This year it does have a lot more, but only on the north-eastern and south-western sides of the tree...... strange. Over the 15 months we have been here we have added a fair bit of organic matter to the dry dusty soil that was here, and have scattered several applications of CK77 over the entire garden. I'm not sure whether the tree finally decided it was old enough to flower, or our feeding the soil, or the copious amounts of Winter rain we had this year.

Don't give up hope on yours just yet.

Cheers, Jules

My poincianas are flowering at the moment but are also putting on a lot of new growth so the flowers are hard to see under the leaves.

You won't be able to buy a plant in Melb, so you'll have to grow it from seed. You'll need hothouse conditions to get the seed to germinate. (Maybe a mini-greenhouse.)

If it grows, it will have to be in a pot up against a sunny wall in a location where you can shield it from the double-whammy of Melbourne's winter cold and rain. (Assuming that Melb's summers don't kill it off, with those climatic rollercoaster days!)

You won't get it to flower, not without professional-level greenhouse conditions where you can control temperature *and* light. (I assume it would flower in those conditions.)

I suppose you're tired of everyone telling you to try Caesalpinia pulcherrima instead (aka dwarf poinciana, peacock flower, Barbados pride, Barbados flower-fence)? It's supposed to be able to grow OK outside of the sub/tropics and, even if it does die back in winter, should return in spring. It's smaller than the Delonix, and doesn't have that beautiful horizontal out-of-African silhouette of the Delonix. I've got a yellow-flowered form (C. pulcherrima 'flava') growing in a pot, awaiting transplant to the garden in autumn. (See link below.) It's very pretty, but the common variety has a more vivid flower colour (orange and yellow, instead of pure yellow). The foliage of both is soft and lacy, very pretty even without flowers.

(I've got a small pot of poincianas--very tatty after the summer storms and hailstones--growing as rough-and-ready bonsai. My problem is space, not climate, as people tell me my yard is too small for a poinciana. See link below for a pic.)

So, your chances aren't good ... but that's only a challenge to an enthusiastic gardener! Hopefully someone who's tried growing poincianas in colder climes will be able to provide more info. Good luck!