Mainly yellows

This post is mostly photos of the Daffodils and Wattles around our place.  So we start with a photo from the drive showing both daffodils and a wattle.
 I trust that readers of this blog don't need guidance on which is which!

The subject is mainly yellows so this shot has some white Snowflakes and maroon Hellebores as well as daffs.
 A daffodil close up.
 This patch copped the full force of the fire, and since than has had all sorts of construction traffic over it.  We are amazed that we have got any flowers here at all.
 A bi-coloured daffodil.
 Some jonquils.
These are on a bank just above the Creek.
 The next two do have some yellow - on the stamens if nowhere else!

We also have some yellow Polyanthus on the deck ....
 ...and some other colours.


I hope you are by now across the concept of "mainly".  Here is some pink Prunus blossom.  Our trees seem to be a little late: they probably blame this on being incinerated 18 months ago.
 Ditto for the wattles.  In fact I am astonished at how many have survived and are flowering, or getting ready to flower.  This is a 10m high Silver Wattle (Acacia dealbata).  We are always amused to read people getting excited about this in Pommie Gardening Magazines as a specimen tree.  We have thousands of them!
 A close up of the flowers and foliage.
 Acacia pravissima the Ovens wattle.  Purists get excited about this as it isn't local to this area.  Soon will be the way it spreads.  It isn't fire tolerant although a few seem to have survived.
 Acacia buxifolia: part of the direct seeding by Greening Australia.
 Acacia mearnsii is a bit later flowering but will be great when it does.
 Acacia rubida: we had a few of them, but they didn't survive the fire well.  Also yet to hit its straps.
 We used to have a lot of Hardenbergia violacea but they seemed to have died out before the fire.  I suspect they left seed which got scarified as it's popping up here and there.
Bird migration seems to be firing up.  That includes Flame Robins moving from the lower areas up towards the mountains.  A pair came through our yard today.  This is the male.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more