Further up the hill behind the tea room, in a curve in the rock, stands a Spathodea campanulata, a tropical tree from Africa which in late summer produces clusters of bright red goblet-shaped flowers with a yellow edge on the petals. The individual flowers do not last very long, but each wave of flowers in the cluster is quickly replaced by a new wave.
At our latitude, this tree normally only survives in greenhouses, but, in our garden it was carefully placed against the side of the mountain so that in the winter months the rock absorbs the sun’s heat and keeps it warm.
