seasons

Out-of-reach roses

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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.

Spring surprises

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The extremely slow-to-bloom (16 years!) white wisteria is now fully out and it is so beautiful in form and colour that it deserves a follow-up post. For some reason, its delicacy makes me think of Japan, where I’ve never been. Perhaps the decorations on geisha hair combs in paintings?

The weeping habit has given my verandah view such added beauty that I am quite awed. And just look at the all the reddish new leaves on the climbing and possum-less rose!

Thanks, quoll.

The other spring surprise has been that the bird-sown Pittosporum tree in my garden has also blossomed. There are two indigenous varieties here, one more sweetly scented than the other, I believe. So I have been wondering which this one would turn out to be.

Perhaps I still don’t know, not having the two to compare, but mine definitely has a sweet perfume. It will do me. What a treat!

The bees seemed to think so too.

Welcome wisteria

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For sixteen years the wisteria on my verandah has done a great job as a living shade cloth — but it has never flowered. It was given to me in a pot, grown from a cutting of a white wisteria, so the giver assured me.  I didn’t mind that it didn’t flower, given how lovely were the shape and shade of the leaves.

I bought a normal mauve flowering wisteria and planted it by the laundry.

So when the first leaf bud opened this Spring I rushed to take a photo — and then was stopped short by the odd bump to the right. A bud, a flower bud!! After thinking about it for sixteen years.

In a few days there were more, and as they opened I could see that the flowers were not white, but pale lilac.  Very pretty, subtler than its more uniform mauve cousin. They both have a lick of yellow at their throats.

The other pea-shaped flower in those shades in the garden is the Roi de Carouby snow pea’s magenta and pink, now reaching above the netting and bearing many peas daily.

Signs of Spring

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It’s September, so it must be Spring, but at this altitude we are often some weeks behind in flowering times.

I shudder to think what the wallabies will do to the tender green buds of trees like this birch, but at least they can't reach to the top.

I love the way bulbs have naturalised and thickened into clumps over the years — and I love that wallabies don’t find them tasty.

The winter snowflakes and the jonquils of several varieties, both white and yellow, look perfectly at home around such deciduous trees.

The abundant yellow jonquils like these above may look like mini daffodils but they lack the stateliness as well as the size.

My daffodils only bloom with Spring here, so for me they are the true harbinger. And they have arrived!

Only trouble is, if Spring is here, can snakes be far behind?

Magical Mallacoota

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It was just on dusk when I reached Mallacoota, 23 km east of the highway. A stunningly beautiful spot, and quite a large village, but, as I discovered when I drove to the inlet foreshore, its population must explode in summer.

What I thought was just a pleasantly green and tree-edged park proved to be the largest camping area I have ever seen, with ‘streets’ of numbered empty sites continuing around the point. Hundreds and hundreds of sites. Rows of moorings edged the inlet itself. Mallacoota was clearly a boating and fishing paradise. Darkness was too imminent to explore further, but I vowed to get up early for the sunrise, thinking it would be over the sea, perhaps best viewed from Bastion Point.

 But I was totally disoriented, for by 7am the sun was rising over the inlet itself. And what a sunrise!

Within seconds the vivid colours had softened and, turning to where the river met the sea, I was met with almost unbelievable pinks and mauves. If I saw this on a greeting card or calendar I’d assume it had been ‘doctored’.

Back towards the mountains the pinks had taken hold too, with the small islands of the inlet beginning to show colours other than black.

By the time I got to Point Bastion, my original destination, the sun had risen. There seemed to be islands and a lighthouse floating in the sea — or the sky? — detached and wavering, like a mirage. Gabo Island is real, so I guess that is what I was seeing.

I walked around the Point itself, no easy feat, as the rocks run in long narrow spines towards the sea. I found myself walking sideways to cross them. By the time I left, there was a large yellow machine of some sort — a front-end loader? — revving up noise and black smoke, preparing to help launch several large boats. To my ignorant eyes, they looked the sort in which Hemingway types chased marlin, so I assumed deep sea fishing.

Imagine how this would be multiplied in summer. The magic of Mallacoota is best by far in winter.

Damp glory

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Typical of April, it’s been raining here, offering the sort of disappointingly drizzly days I associated with Saturdays when I was a child. The main splash of colour I see from my desk is the Glory Vine, the grapeless ornamental grape vine that decorates and shades my verandah.

Its job nearly done for the year, the leaves are rapidly changing colour.

But not uniformly or in unison. Some are already deep burgundy with blackish veins, presaging their winter demise, while others stay summer green, stained at the edges with strawberry juice.

In between these extremes there are pale lemons and limes, vivid rusts and scarlets, splotches and streaks like blood, a riot of colour dripping with raindrops — just for me.

Bush bounty

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I don’t plant annuals, so my garden is never the riot of colour that others manage. I rely on bushes and bulbs to surprise me with blossoms.

Outside the house yard, the surrounding bush does the same. Lately there has been an explosion of blossom on a select few of the Angophora floribunda trees. The chosen ones have been so covered that it looked like clotted cream from a short distance.
 I am assuming this is what caused the splashes of cream I could see a week earlier, way off on the far slopes of the higher ridges opposite. Too far away for detail, even with binoculars.
But in the immediate bush, I have no trouble spotting the highlights of summer wildflowers here, the Hyacinth Orchids, Dipodium punctatum. Apparently these orchids live on subterranean fungi which form on the decaying matter of the forest floor.

On tall maroon stalks, their strikingly coloured and splashed pink flowers stand and demand attention amongst the greens and beiges of the tussocks and blady grass. They get it.

A damp end to 2009

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Christmas is over and it’s been raining steadily on the mountain since Christmas night. Welcome gentle rain falling from cloud cover that is allowing a pale warm light through as well –and probably putting a light charge into the solar batteries as well.

I have moved the car out of the carport so it can have the dust washed from its once-bright red duco.

Everything green is even greener; I try not to watch the grass growing or think of the mowing ahead of me when it stops and dries out. But that’s next week.

This week I have a good excuse to stay inside tapping away on the computer, working on my next book.
Beyond occasional emergency dashes I am confined within the cabin and the verandah’s dripping edges.

From here I can see the little dam rainspotted and filling back up to its reedy edges, and a young kangaroo mother and child grazing beyond the fence, their fur much darker in the rain. They seem unbothered by the weather; I assume they are warm and dry beneath their bedraggled coats.

I know we’d both prefer this to heat and fire-danger.

‘Tis the season

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Not to be jolly, as we are supposed to be, but a whole mix of emotions, and mostly not even on the up scale to jolly.

Why? Because Copenhagen came so close to Christmas, and delivered such a sad affirmation of the power of the corporate and capitalist world to ignore the urgent needs of the earth and its most vulnerable nations. The gift of the rich to the poor was a callous and hypocritical thumbs-down.

It is even more despairing because leaders like Rudd and even Obama have coupled the words ‘meaningful’ and ‘agreement’ into one senseless compound word; they did not reach anything meaningful if they meant to stop global warming. It is still tokenism.

A pity the U.S. isn’t closer to sea level, or that a tsunami of reality hasn’t hit Rudd yet.

So yes, I am filled with a wide and pervasive sadness for the world, and an anger at those who are the most guilty yet the most unrepentant because they will not do what is needed to make amends; have they even said ‘Sorry’?
I chose this photo for my Christmas post because it holds that mix of light and dark layers which I think many are feeling at present.
For I do have hope. Perhaps it was foolishly optimistic to think that world leaders would have shaken off the yoke of their corporate masters just because the planet is in mortal danger – or not in one go.

After all, they did at least agree that they lived on the same planet.

The tragedy is that it would be so easy to cut emissions and turn our economies around to non-fossil fuels if our leaders and our politics were not so trammelled by the machinations of Big Business.

Yet we have seen some changes — some for the worst, looking at the the Abbott dinosaur party — so 2010 may move minds and generate ‘green’ as the only way to go for smart countries.

Nature always soothes me with its beauty and regenerative powers, so I offer this sky pic to my readers as my seasonal greeting.

I’d better offer it to my friends and family too, as I didn’t get round to sending even one Christmas card this year; somehow all those Santas and presents seemed a little obscene as I thought of the children of Africa, hearing from their leaders that the world said NO.

Peace and hope to you all,
Sharyn

Blessing the blossoms

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blossoms-1I have two of these shrubs planted in my yard. They are native, although not indigenous to the area, but  this is my garden after all. I think they are Melaleuca ericiflolia, or Swamp Paperbark. This Spring everything seems blessed with an abundance of blossoms, in excess of years past.

This butterfly is taking full advantage of the bounty; I think it’s a Plain Tiger or Lesser Wanderer (Danaus chrysippus), thanks to Martin Purvis. Please tell me, anyone, if I’m wrong.

The bees were enjoying the yellow-tipped cream brushes too. Bees must be run off their little feet right now, as the garden is such a riot of blossom.
blossoms-2My two huge nashi pear trees are decked out in bridal white — so pure and pretty that it hurts my heart to see it.

Nashis do very well here, giving me and the parrots and the bower birds more fruit than we can eat. The beauty of nashis is that they will ripen off the tree, and to an astonishing honey sweetness.

I feel sorry for people who have only tried supermarket nashis, which are always unripe.

Garden gifts

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gift-1Just spring, and another of my old-fashioned camellia bushes has come into bloom. Grown from cuttings taken from the garden of an old house in Port Macquarie, this one is lolly pink, streaked with strawberry. A candy camellia. Ain’t she sweet?
gift-2In a less domesticated part of my yard, three native plants have formed a dainty trio. A young Omalanthus tree, often called the Bleeding Heart Tree, only as tall as myself, has been wreathed in thin vines: the clinging bridal shower of Clematis aristata, Traveller’s Joy, and the purple pea highlights of Hardenbergia, Native Sarsparilla. The tree I propagated and planted, the vines are surprise gifts of nature.

The lime green leaves of the Clematis are echoed by the long budding racemes of the King Orchids (Dendrobium speciosum, var. hillii) . A spectacular native orchid, it will be even more so when the flowers are open.
gift-3Found in my rainforest gully years ago, the increasing weight of this clump had probably caused the casuarina branch on which it had grown to come crashing down. I relocated it to rocks at the base of a stringybark in my yard, where it has fleshily multiplied since.

Whoever said the Australian bush is drab?!!

Indoor Spring

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nectarine-1I have now managed to prune four of my fruit trees so as to be able to net them later. It has to be gradual, as my thumb joints don’t like too much secateur work at a time.

One of these trees, the nectarine, had so many closed buds that I felt like a murderess – well, an abortionist really, or at least a very wasteful woman, as I thought of all those nectarine fruits that would never be.

The other prunings, the peaches and the plum, were not so advanced; I could bear to pile them up to burn. But not these tiny tight buds of deep rose colour.

So I brought them indoors and filled several large vases with their tall twiggy promises.
nectarine-2Now, one week later, Spring has come to my cabin interior as those buds have burst into fragile pink blooms with spangles of stamens and even an occasional bright green leaf unfolding.

As there are still closed buds, the range of shades from translucent pink to rich burgundy offer an extra visual treat.

Given that these blossoms are usually outdoors, on the tree, I have never smelt them before. In a closed environment, it isn’t pleasant, being reminiscent of ammonia, and even overpowers that of the vase of jonquils in my bedroom. Perhaps it’s the nectarines’ revenge for being picked prematurely.

But most things – and people – do not excel in every sense: the beauty of these blossoms is enough.

I just remove them from my bedroom at night.