Spring Has Certainly Sprung

Anybody who knows me well knows that I hate gardening but I love gardens. I usually grumble when I have to work in the garden, although ironically I'm pretty sure I have a green thumb and a little commonsense when it comes to looking after plants. My most successful gardening attempt came when I moved into a terrace house in Sydney city with Jozef and ex-Black Mermaid Productions™ partner Bruce Love at the time we were working on WaveDancers. The back courtyard was a veritable tangle of weeds and plants that could not breathe. The previous tenants or the landlord had not watered or fertilised them for goodness knows how long, so I put on some gardening gloves and got to work. I pulled out the weeds, pruned and watered all the established plants, swept and removed all the rubbish only to reveal that the back yard was concrete rather than dirt. I also found some large bones buried in the soil which I speculated to be the remains of a human murder victim, but I was met with laughs and derision by my two house-mates who shall remain nameless in this sentence at least! Mind you this was before CSI or other forensic television show days so I wouldn't have known where to go to get them analysed. The upshot of cultivating the garden was that within a week the plants grew new buds and within about two to three weeks the garden just absolutely came to life and began to thrive with a little TLC.

During the last few weeks I have been watching the garden on the farm erupt in blooms. I don't know what it is about the weather conditions everything is flowering en masse. I went snap happy yesterday trying to capture everything – I hope you don't mind me showing you. Oh, and just so you know, I'm not good at identifying plants – I barely know their generic names let alone their Latin names.

The first pic is of the daisies and whatevers around the base of the gum tree (eucalypt). The second pic is of a beautiful red rose. I'm not usually a rose person (I like more exotic flowers) but this one left me marveling at nature. It had the look and feel of red velvet – you know the kind that is used for curtains at a theatre.  Georgia O'Keeffe would have had a field day with this rose if she got up close and personal. The third pic is of the cottage garden around the fountain near our BBQ area. Lovely!