Protea

Well, they did say that this winter would be a long, hard one, and how right they were! We must have had about three and a half months of it already and it is getting way beyond monotonous. I woke up this morning to find an overcast sky and everywhere covered in a freshly fallen blanket of snow. People had been so busy clearing their driveways and yesterday the snow was beginning to melt a little. Today, they start all over again. And, of course, we know that this is going to happen many more times yet before spring arrives : )

Into the archives I just had to go, finding something with colour, something tropical : ) This was a huge Protea flower that I bought from my grocery store back on 18 April 2011. Such amazing flowers!

"Protea /ˈproʊtiːə/ is both the botanical name and the English common name of a genus of South African flowering plants, sometimes also called sugarbushes (Afrikaans: suikerbos).

The genus Protea was named in 1735 by Carl Linnaeus after the Greek god Proteus, who could change his form at will, because proteas have such a wide variety of forms.

The Proteaceae family to which proteas belong is an ancient one. Its ancestors grew in Gondwana, 300 million years ago. Proteaceae is divided into two subfamilies: the Proteoideae, best represented in southern Africa, and the Grevilleoideae, concentrated in Australia and South America and the other smaller segments of Gondwana that are now part of eastern Asia. Africa shares only one genus with Madagascar, whereas South America and Australia share many common genera — this indicates they separated from Africa before they separated from each other." From Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protea