Dear garden lovers,

I have 3 protea neriifolia in separate locations on the garden bed. Two seem to be flowering healthily (it's winter where we are), while the other seem to be:

- having its leaves turn completely gray-ish/brown - and it seems it's actually dried out there :(

- a bit more horizontal than the others, even the flowers are growing sideways

- the stems where the leaves have turned all grey/brown, have stunted flowers, very small and all gray as well

- it rained heavily yesterday and I only noticed it being sickly looking this morning onwards (could this be related? but I don't remember looking at it properly for the past 2 weeks).

The other two plants have tiny dark spots on some of the leaves, other than that, they seem ok.

Could this be a kind of fungus/root rot? What should I do?

I've read up about pruning protea and using them as cut flowers - does anyone have tips about this? The only detailed stuff I could find on the web is in www.proteaflora.com.au so far...I was wondering how to dry them for display, but I guess I should worry about that after figuring out this problem first.