Damp delights

After a week of rain, cabin-bound except for squelching dashes to get wood, it was a treat to be able to walk about outside. 

While the cloud was keeping its weeping to itself, it was hugging the ground, reluctant to depart.

But still much easier weather for a perky kookaburra to keep an eye out for grubs on the move or emerging worms.

My dam overflow gully was running like the stream I wish it was, gurgling over rocks and bringing the moss to its brightest, greenest velvet.

When we first moved here in the 1970s, living in a tent, we got our fresh water from this springfed ‘stream’ for weeks.

But it’s not only the moss that loves the damp weather. The lichens are positively leaping into prominence from their encrustations on rocks and bark and whatever else will stand still long enough. They add cold colour, icy greens that shade to white and mimic coral. 

Miniature marvels

I am a sucker for miniatures, natural or man-made.  Having taken many photos of large and impressive webworks, presumably by large spiders, I was charmed to come across these creations by smaller artists.

Jewelled perfection slung between two twigs, yet smaller than my thumb. Awe-inspiring.

I walked about the garden seeking more treasures, and on a birch tree I found a tiny horizontal arrangement, a diamond net to catch a cloud-drop.

Such beauties are why I love living close to nature. They keep me sane, in a wider world that does not value these intricate riches as I do. After all, there is no export ‘demand’ for ephemeral diamonds.

Blazing farewells

It is winter, but the deciduous trees and vines don’t all drop their leaves at once. It’s a nicely timed taking of turns to blaze out their seasonal farewells.

This beauty is the very last leaf on the whole Glory Vine. On a misty morning, its bright pink is almost shocking. I want a lipstick exactly that colour. And look at the perfect jewel suspended from its tendril.

The Liquid Amber is the last, and the most spectacular tree, glowing even inside a cloud.

The Crimson Rosellas must relate to the crimson fallen leaves;  they are almost camouflaged amongst them.

Damp surprise

You have to keep your eyes wide open around here, for you never know what oddity nature will toss about unannounced.

It’s been wet and cold and i’ve not been outside much, but at least there are some breaks today.  Dashing out to the woodpile during one of them, I squinted at a pale dab of colour beneath the leafless birch tree.

It could well be an autumn leaf blown from a more distant tree — or, more exciting, it could be a new slime mould!

I squelched closer, noting the rapid growth in the bulb leaves since I last checked. Nope, not slime mould, but an overly populated clump of fungi.

I remember that there were several clumps here one other year, although not in this exact spot. I didn’t recall them being so ‘toothy’, almost like sea anemones. I didn’t identify them then, and still can’t, despite trying anew.

I’ll have to settle for my usual admiring and ignorant astonishment at the complexity of life if we let it be.

Perfect pods

The small details of the plant world often make me wish I’d become a botanist. In my day, if they were ‘going on’ after high school, girls did nursing or teaching — to tide them over until they got married.

I have been unable to decide whether, had I been born later, I’d have studied botany or industrial design. I see similarities between the two – functionality and beauty.

The young indigenous Native Frangipani trees (Hymenosporum flavum) that I have raised and planted are themselves seeding now. A new generation. The pods look like green four-lobed fruit until they brown, split in two, and fan out their channels of round, rimmed seeds like decks of cards, or stacks of coins.

These delicate and quaint beauties made me think of Leunig’s Mr Curly cartoons, of swans, of shy creatures unknown.

I couldn’t draw a more exquisitely curving line than they each have. The seed pods are woody but feather-light, carrying one black seed each in a shapely niche.

The shrub they are from, a hakea, is not indigenous and to my shame I have forgotten what it is called, but it had creamy fountains of flowers and the butterflies loved it.

I usually note down everything I plant, so if someone can please enlighten me, I will remedy that omission!

Marsupial mowers

Having opened my house yard gates over a year ago, I never expected to have to mow grass again. Given that I was sacrificing so many garden plants and shrubs to the apparently omni-herbivorous marsupials who took up the occupancy offer…

I should have known better. They don’t like long grass, tussocks or certain introduced grasses that must have come in with horse feed. They were too busy with roses and lavender and jasmine and grapevines and citrus to bother with most of the grassed areas.

When I finally began to mow the jungle again, the kangaroos appreciated it, immediately claiming the ‘lawn’ section as their afternoon lolling spot.

Then the mower gave it up as too long, too dense, too damp, and so it remains.

But wallaby or roo, they love kikuyu.

Hearing clicking sounds floating in through my ‘office’ window the other day, I went to investigate.

Several wallabies were so assiduously working on the kikuyu near the cabin that they were audibly chomping, pulling up the grass and snapping the stems.

On the other side of the cabin, a young wallaby was sitting in the trench, paws on the table as it nibbled its way through the grassy fare laid upon it — not kikuyu.

The elongated rear view thus offered was interesting because of the distinct colour changes in its fur.

They are called Eastern Red-necked Wallabies but they are also Red-tail-based and the shadings to grey and back again are soft and subtle.

When it abruptly sat up, its little dark-rimmed ears erect and alert and its childish elbows tucked in close, I followed its stare. A black snake, scooting into the long grass, too fast for the camera.

At least I can see them in shorter grass; keep eating, I urged the wallaby!

Green Glory Vine

Noticing that the first reddish tones of Autumn were appearing in some leaves of the Glory Vine that clothes the western ends of my verandah and mud walled cabin, I decided I’d better celebrate its green stage before I lost it for the year.

I am always astonished at how vigorous it is, how far it grows over summer from being totally cut back to woody stumps each winter.

Despite — or perhaps because of? — the wallabies nibbling the lower shoots and trying to get at more from my verandah, it was even more far-reaching.  As you see, I netted the bottom vines, barred my verandah access, and off it took!

As it reached higher I strung more wires for it, which were greedily seized, enveloped and looped about, gradually  greening and cooling the afternoon light through the windows.

Don’t worry about it blocking that door — there’s a bookshelf on the other side anyway!

The door is there because the cabin was only ever half-built, one wing of the original — and still intended — ‘V’ design. One day.

Once on the verandah the Glory Vine takes second place to the Wisteria, threading its broad fans through the finer fronds, adding texture as well as pattern and of course, more shade, to this western corner.

So before I start waxing lyrical about the riotous colours of Autumn — glory to the green Glory Vine!

Fruit firsts

I don’t understand what’s going on in my orchard — or not going on, actually. The bower birds and the king parrots have arrived, as usual, to eat the fruit on the trees that I haven’t got around to netting, which is all of them this year.

I knew the mulberries were coming ripe in stages and have been going over to stand and eat my breakfast’s first course on the hoof, so to speak.  This year I don’t have time to pick them in bulk and turn them into jam or pies —  I need a tribe of children to come and eat them.

But I don’t get why the birds haven’t eaten them yet; the ripe ones are as sweet as they come and all the rain has made them full and juicy.

Assuming the birds will take them all soon, I thought I’d photograph the bounty just to show it can happen.

That’s when I spotted the cherries. In 16 years I have never seen the fruit on my two cherry trees get past a few faint blushes of pink before they disappear. I may have eaten one — once. But the trees are tall and skinny — and laden; far too high to reach easily, but I am thinking of lopping them just to get those gorgeous globes.

Any bird would be mad to pass these up; what is going on?

My special skinks

I have a family of skinks who frequently dive under a flap of the dampcourse of my cabin footings, thence probably into a chink in those footings; a small pointy nose is sometimes to be seen poking out of the underfloor vent grille.
 But most of the time they pose like statues and await slow-witted insects to pass by. 

I think they are Southern Water Skinks of the Warm Temperate Form (Eulamprus tympanum WTF, more recently renamed Eulamprus heatwolei). They are fat and fearless, about 250mm long, and seem to operate in distinct mini-territories.

This one stays on the verandah front rails and steps and comes much closer to me and my doings. She is quite inquisitive, far less inclined to dart away — or to dart at all — and doesn’t mind a bit of shade as she often hunts amongst the greenery.

I have absolutely no idea why I think this one is a ‘she’, as I have no idea how to sex lizards.  When she feels like a bit of sun, she chooses the rocks on the front side of the steps, and shows her gorgeous metallic colours.

I can sit and admire her for ages; just look at the intricacy of her patterning, the ebony and lacework side trims and the woven bronze of her back. That pink nose, that elegantly lidded eye, that perfect earhole!

The other skink, who occupies the rear side of the steps and darts off when I pass, happened to be sunning himself there at the very same time as his greenie friend was out the front, so I was able to take photos of them both, in the same light, to compare. 

Is it my imagination or does the one below have a more pinkish coppery tone to his back? And is the nose a less distinctly differentiated pink?

Either one is a jewelled beauty, as well as cute; who needs garden gnomes, bronze statuary or even trendy rusty iron sculptures when I can have these?

Out-of-reach roses

This year I have only three varieties of rose in bloom  — all climbing varieties. The others were shrubs but are now mere snapped sticks and stripped stems, some with a topknot of leaves where the wallabies and roos can’t reach.

Last year they all bloomed but the climbing ones were eaten by the possum. Since the quoll seems to have eaten the possum, where these roses have climbed out of reach of the determinedly reaching macropods, they are giving me a fabulous display in this late Spring.

The Crepuscule rose on the verandah is bursting with buds and its ragged apricot blooms are buzzing with bees. This rose has been climbing for about 15 years and its stems are thick and woody and likely to lift the battens on the verandah roof eaves where it snakes around the side, but I can’t bring myself to tell it it stop.

These roses drop their petals fairly quickly when cut, but the other two varieties last well inside. Stuck inside working away on my book, I don’t get outside much now to enjoy them where they grow, so I bring them in.

I am delighted and awed by their beauty every time I look at them. This delicate old-fashioned shell-pink beauty is Madame Carrìère and she bedecks the rusty shed walls, but only above about two metres.

The densely cupped rich yellow flowers of the Graham Thomas rose on the ‘guest wing’ are right beneath where the possum was living, and its stems were constantly broken as it climbed. Now it arches freely and blooms in profusion; I love the sheer opulence of its fat full cups!

As I never know how long any particular balance will last among the creatures here, I shall enjoy these roses while I can, and hope the macropods don’t learnt to climb.

Flirting with domesticity

Lately I have noticed that a wallaby mother and her joey have taken to sitting under my verandah. In fact she sits right up against the mud wall, under where my front door opens, so I walk over the top of her often. My verandah decking is pretty bouncy and noisy– as am I — and the screen door unavoidably scrapes out and back across the uneven boards, in order to exclude the slimmest snake when the door is shut.

Nothing fazes her, and I have become used to the glimpses of fur between the boards and beneath my feet. There is perhaps a metre clearance there.

So the other day, as I crossed the verandah and headed down the steps,  I was surprised to hear a deep snort/cough from behind and below me, and a heavy, panicky thud or two. I peered between the step treads and there was a very large wallaroo, now silhouetted near the sub-verandah opening. He saw me, gave another loud cough — almost a bark — and leapt away.

Of course I leapt for the camera, hoping he had paused. As he had, only a few metres uphill, and still inside the yard.

In the six months or so since the yard has been open, the few wallaroos about have rarely come inside. I love it when they do, as there is something about their long fur and their powerful build that is more ‘wild’  than even a big male kangaroo. To have one choose to come so close to the house is unprecedented, but to have him choose to go in under the verandah is astonishing!

It is bare dirt under there, raked clean of dead leaves only weeks ago, in readiness for the summer fire season. There is nothing to eat. I wonder — is he sussing it out for a shady spot for summer, or is he thinking of compromising his wildness, of flirting with domesticity?

Blokes and blossoms

While the wallaby females ferry and feed the joeys, the males do blokey stuff — like fighting. 

I had seen very young males practice-fighting in my yard but these two were old enough and big enough for the real thing.

Given that they chose the grass right next to my shaded glasshouse for their wrestling and kickboxing, I kept imagining a lurch, a crash of breaking glass, as they danced about on their hind legs or balanced on their tails.

But after a while they simply tired of it and went back to eating grass. They vary this with checking for any new shoots on the reachable branches of my mighty Banksia Rose, which they keep stripped bare of blossoms and leaves and looking like a strange fringe to the lush flowering above. They stand on their hind legs to do this too.