Buds and red lines

As autumn turns to winter, it's just dry and sunny here and the nights are cold so the succulents in my garden are acquiring very intense colours from sun and heat stress in the dry weather. It's also time for the crassula and cotyledons to start flowering as they are originally from a climate that receives rain in winter, so, they bloom and grow most in autumn and winter. They grow outside at my place so they get rain in summer and I don't bother to water them in winter but they don't seem to mind and keep to their built-in seasonal clocks.

These buds are a little further along in their progress towards becoming flowers than the cluster above and the large, red bell-shaped flowers will still take a while to form

First published here on my blog in WeKu