The Cat Came Back. Get them Microchipped.

G'Day,
Look what I got! Apart from the biggest smile on my face. Yes! That is Boo.She is back. Who would have ever believed that my cat would come home to me after being lost for seven and a half months. (She looks a lot like Martha's Mumma cat)
When I got home from work yesterday she was hiding behind the lounge, so I picked her up for a cuddle and she didn't seem too wild. After we had tea and I sat on the lounge she walked along the lounge and onto my lap and stayed there purring loud and continuously for the rest of the night. Isn't she wonderful.
I guess that answers the question of "I wonder if she will be wild and if she will remember us?", doesn't it.
She is in not too bad a condition considering. She must have been getting looked after by someone. She is molting rather badly and a bit skinny but otherwise she looks o.k. My daughter Annie came back with her to Canberra for a drive and an overnight visit and she gave her a good brushing and trimmed up a couple of mats that were in her coat, but she will need some follow up.
Look at my yucky hands, still showing the sores from my recent visit to the dermatologist.
Yep she is making her self at home. The cushion behind her is the one I got to pat at night as her substitute. She likes it too. At this moment she is curled up underneath the spare bed on the trundle mattress. It is under what used to be Annie's bed and it was her favorite sleeping place before she got lost. She spent the night going between Mum's and Annie's beds giving them cat cuddles and waking them up but rubbing her face against theirs. He he. She remembers everything. Even Rufus, when he came up to her last night she gave him a kitty kiss and touched noses with him. Lovely kitty, now my house in Canberra is complete.
The rest of the post is showing off the flowers around my yard at the moment. The one above is an Iris.
A Granny's bonnet. I really liked this photo it shows the flower being translucent and back lit by a gray sky, I hope we get some rain.
A little Marigold. Looking like fire.
The photinia that sheilds the side of the back yard view from people walking down along park.It is in flower at the moment so I am not enjoying it's smell and it is a hay fever plant. I know if you cutr the flowers off you can prevent this and you get a new crop of lovely red new growth but I can't do it because they are too tall and there is a great line of them all the way along the fence so it is too big a job for me to tackle.
These are the big everlasting daisies that Mum bought. I showed them off a couple of posts ago in a vase with some waratah. The Waratah ha sfinished but these flowers can be kept. I stripped off the foliage and trimmed the stems back. Tied them together and hung them up outside to dry. I think the ones that are more open may lose their centres but the partly opened ones should do fine.
This is a big bush of snowball or Viburnum sterile' that is in the front yard in full flower at the moment. Ah Spring!
We have lots of these annoying little beastie weeds. I have been digging them out but there are so many of them that it is just about impossible to get them all before they drop seed .
Last but not least are a patch of pretty, hardy, Gazania in the front garden near the letter box.
I have to go now, My eldest son Michael is going for a driving test this morning to get his licence. I reckon he will pass o.k. if he doesn't get too nervous. He is ready.
Ah! aren't we on a roll!
Bye
Love Linda.

OMG! Guess What.

G'Day,
I can't believe it! Today has been one of my best days ever.
Seven and a half months ago I moved to Canberra from Junee. Pete and I came over here before hand and found this house we are now living in and snapped it up before anyone else did but there were conditions. We had to do a bit of talking to bring our little dog over here with us because the house was leased to us with a clause of "No Pets". I wasn't game to ask about my dear Kitty "Boo" so I asked my son David who lives in Wagga to look after her for us. He took her reluctantly but that same night she broke through the screen gauze on his bedroom window and escaped, never to be seen again. I searched, put advertisements in the newspaper and on the radio to no avail, left pictures of her and a letter for the person who was buying our house ands spoke to all the neighbours in case she found her way back home to Junee. We never heard a thing.
This morning I got a phone call from my old next door neighbour, Tracy, and she said that one of her day care Mums had come to her house to drop off her child to be looked after when she went to work. The lady said she had been over to the vets in Wagga with her dog yesterday and been asked if she knew the people living at our old address and she said that she didn't but she knew the people next door. They said they had a cat there who they had had for a while and couldn't contact the owners. So Tracy rang me to tell me about it.
I rang Kooringal vets and they said that yesterday afternoon they had surrendered the cat to the pound to be destroyed as they couldn't find the owner. I rang the pound and they still had her there and when I told them my story they said that they would keep her for me. Then I just had to talk to the real estate agents to contact the owner of our rented house to see if we could keep her.
I went over to the estate agency and asked to talk to the property manager. When he came out he remembered me from the house inspection when he came here less than 2 weeks ago. I have never had a problem with those and when they did the inspection they actually complimented me and thanked me for being a good tenant and keeping everything nice. Anyway, I went over there and told my story, he spoke to the owner and he said we could have the cat subject to a clause being added to our rental agreement about any damage being caused etc. So I can have my cat back!
I was so excited, I had tears in my eyes and was struggling not to spill them when the real estate bloke said yes.
I can't imagine how she has changed over the last 7 and a half months that she has been lost. Or where she has been and how she survived her ordeal. I bet she isn't a fussy eater anymore. She was always a timid kitty and we tried to keep her indoors mostly because we were scared of losing her on the road like we did our last 2 cats in Junee. She will be around two and half years old by now. I wonder if she will remember us, I hope though that when she smells familiar things like the furniture and us and household things that she might. I will have to keep her securely locked up for quite a while until she settles in with us. She knows how to open sliding doors and we have several of them here.Plus she is not getting outside to hunt the birdy visitors we have.
One problem, not insurmountable though, is we have to pay to get her back, but we don't get paid until Thursday. David is on holidays and over here in Canberra at the moment so he will pick her up on Wednesday, tomorrow. I hate having to borrow money from Mum, even though she has offered, but there is already a bit on our credit card and I am loath to put any more on top of that. We have been short on disposable income since moving here.
But I can have my cat back!
After seven and a half months!
I can't believe it!
I can't wait to hold her and rub my hand down her fur and have her purr on my chest of a morning when we let her in the room. Well after she settles back in anyway. I have missed that so much, and always said a home isn't home without a cat. I even bought a fluffy cushion to sit and pat of a night in front of the T.V. that feels like cat fur. He he.
Oh yeah, and the other good thing that happened today was, I went back to have the stitch taken out of my forehead after having a biopsy taken at the dermatologist last week and the results were negative for sun cancer , it was a pre- cancerous keratosis. So I don't have to get more chopped out of my eyebrow.And! there was no charge for removing the stitch.
So all round it was an excellent day. Now my poor puddy cat just has to readjust to being back in our family again. I will write more after we get her back.
Good Night.
Love Linda.

Sunday Scribblings. Awesome.

G'Day,
The Sunday Scribblings prompt this week is Awesome!
Awesome, that doesn't sound like me. I don't like to put myself forwards, bragging about myself is not me. I don't like to hear others bragging about themselves either.

Bec said I was awesome
And gave me a hug
I think she was drunk
I'm not the sort you would love.

I am more the self deprecatory type. I often get in trouble for being like that though.
Gawd, this is really not my nature.

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I would rather bore you with the details of what I did today. My son David has left his dog with us for the weekend to babysit. Ruby is a black Stafford shire terrier. She is a dog with character. She just looks scary but she is really quite a loving, gentle natured dog. She is very spoilt and I think she is fretting for David because he lets her sleep in the bed with him. Well, Uh uh not in my house,last night she was put outside.
This morning I was woken by a cranky Nanny who was ready to wring her neck. She had been barking off and on all night and had trampled all over the garden and dug holes in it. We had to replant 2 strawberry plants and a tomato plus fill a few holes in the vege garden as well as put a guard around some other plants. Tonight she will be sleeping in the laundry.This afternoon I tried to water the garden but she had other ideas and decided she wanted to bite the water. She can jump really high, at least as high as my height. It was funny to start with but then we had to put her on a leash so I could finish the job in peace.
For the rest of the day we went to a caravan and camping show. We wandered around looking at and discussing the merits of the different styles on show. I found a few new favourites amongst the brands that I had not seen displayed before. I also spent half an hour listening to a gardening expert bloke who is on the Better Homes and Gardens show on T.V. talking about looking after your soil and composting. He was a very good speaker and had the crowd well entertained. If you are not a gardener you probably find it funny that gardeners would enjoy such things but enjoy it I did. I also found out I have been doing something right, whenever I plant things into the garden I make up a cocktail of seaweed extract and fish emulsion. It makes a big difference to getting my plants off to a good start, and it is organic so causes no harm to the environment.
That is about all for tonight.
Bye
Love Linda.

Windy Morning.

G'Day,
I was just sitting outside having my breakfast and thinking how lovely it was when I thought I could write about this.
Here Tis'.
This morning it is windy, and sunny.
It is whistling around the corners of the house like an asthmatic child breathlessly blowing on a whistle, stopping for a breath, trying again, but not giving up. It is rattling the fence and awnings adding to the cacophony.
The sort of wind you get that has a slight chill, but the sun still shines through it and warms your back, making you smile at the pleasure of it all. Ruffling your hair and parting it in different directions and refreshing it with air.
The wisteria that has been flowering so beautifully for the last few weeks is now drying out and the wind is shaking petals off the plants in showers of pretty mauve confetti, which is falling gracefully, being picked up by the wind, blowing it along, until it meets an obstacle then swirling it in tiny eddies before taking off to collect in drifts against the edge of the lawn.
The sky is a full bright blue and there are tiny fluffy cotton wool clouds scuttling quickly across my view changing shape, prompting my imagination to make pictures with them before they change again.
The big eucalypts in Macarthur park at the side of my house are whipping about. I am wondering if the branches might be over extended and snap at any moment and if the birds that nest in them at this time of year will lose their babies that they have put so much energy into rearing.
I hope that the fluffy clouds will start to bank up and bring with them some more rain to fill our dams and water our yards for free. This time of year with the warm spring weather and wind we sometimes have thunder storms in the afternoon and evening, here's hoping.

=====================================

I went to the dermatologists appointment that I had been waiting to come up for the last few months.
She froze about 20spots, mostly on my arms and hands, with her little bottle of liquid nitrogen. Also took a biopsy of one spot on my left eye brow. It could be a continuation of a spot I had removed about 4 years ago. It had cells of both Basal cell and Squamous cell carcinoma in it the last time I had it removed. If they have to take more of it away my eyebrow is going to look pretty funny. I don't have thick eyebrows, just wide, and last time it was cut into it took ages to thicken up and look normal again. Squamous cell carcinomas can get nasty if they are not seen to and spread to other parts of your body. Basal cell ones can too but they are not as nasty as the other ones unless you let them get big. My eyebrow is a bit sore but not to bad. I have to get the stitch taken out and the results next week.

After I was at the Dr yesterday, we went into civic and had lunch before going to work. My son's best friend had twins with his partner last week. They were born on Friday morning so I wanted to find a present for them. I found a Peter rabbit and a Jemima puddle duck soft toy for each of them. It was hard to find something that matched. I was actually looking for a pink and a blue Teddy bear but couldn't find a pair of them that matched so I settled on the Beatrix Potter characters instead. They are very cute. I hope they like them.
Michael is quite happy with himself because he is to be Godfather to them when they are christened. He and John have been friends since they went to early high school together in Junee. John's mum calls herself my son's "other mother". :)
My first memory of John was as a 12 yr old who bought his ferret to our house for the weekend. The boys went up to Rocky hill to see if they could get some rabbits. The ferret took off after a rabbit down a burrow and got lost, or interested, anyway it didn't come back out again. The boys came home upset and went back the next morning to search again. Bart, the little Jack Russell dog we had at the time, went with them and went down a hole and came back with the ferret. John did lots of talking and coaxing to try to convince me that weekend that ferrets were lovely critters and not the stinky nippy things I still believe they are. John is tall and I think I remember that when I first met him he was taller than me then. I don't think I even come up to his shoulder nowadays. So his son will be tall and strong like him.:) I fell privileged to watch my children and their long time friends progress through life :).
O.k. I am going back out to the sunshine.
Bye
Love Linda.

My Spring Garden & Duntroon Lookout.

G'Day
Guess what! It has finally sunk in to my thick skull. I can do it all by myself.
What Lindy? What are you waffling on about this time?
Woo hoo, I am a grown up blogger now because I can put pictures on my blog all by myself without pestering my dear son to do it for me! He he.
And Yes I have been! For my last 4 or 5 posts I have finally remembered all the steps to do it alone.
These first pictures are for my friend at "Pear Tree Cottage". She told me her Mum was born here in Canberra at Duntroon and she likes to see pictures of Canberra.Canberra would have been very different than it was when she was born here 88 years ago.
Duntroon is the training base here in Canberra for the Australian Army.It is pretty cool because it is a designated nature reserve as well and there are lots of birds everywhere.
Anyway yesterday I went into Duntroon and up to the Lookout there to take some pictures for her.
The first one above is from the lookout looking towards Fyshwick with the airport in the distance.
In the foreground at the bottom of the hill in the next photo you can see some of the lovely old original buildings with lots of chimneys and painted a mustardy colour. Next Wednesday Michael and I will be cleaning one of the original houses there that is being refurbished. It is the residence of the camp commandant. We have cleaned up 2 houses inside the camp before after the builders refurbished them before this one, it is not bad work and I get to have a look how the other half lives in the top ranks of the army, which is quite different to the housing that we grew up in as army brats when my Dad was in the army.

Below is the view from the lookout across the lake looking towards Kingston. Kingston is quite close to the city so it is a sought after residential area and business area and the foreshore is getting redeveloped with big expensive higher density housing.You can see it if you enlarge the pic.
This is looking back towards the city. You can see the Black Mountain Telstra tower in the background. I think it looks like a big giant syringe hovering over the city.You can go up inside it to viewing platforms and get a great 360 degree view all over the city.In the foreground is the suburb of Russell, which is mostly govt and defence office buildings.The big obelisk you can see is an eagle sitting on the top on a ball. It is a monument given to Canberra by the Americans. Something like that anyway.

Right. The rest of the pictures posted today are showing off my spring garden.
Since coming here I have gone through a lot of changes in my lifestyle. I am at last loving it here and resigned to the fact that I don't have my own house and garden like the one I had in Junee and have adjusted and learned to like what I do have and work with it. I do have a nice house and garden. I despaired at first at leaving my own patch of earth behind and wasn't impressed by this yard but now that it is spring everything has come to life and I appreciate the the soil here is good and the existing plants are too. I still have a lot of things that I loved and bought with me from Junee in pots and they have sprung back to life with the new season here. Though I have lost a couple of my special plants to the harsh frosts of winter. One in particular I was sad to loose because I have had it forever and it was a piece that came from a cane begonia that belonged to my maternal grandmother who died when I was just 5 yrs old. It really looks like it won't recover this time.

The picture above is of a pot of bulbs that sat on my front veranda in Junee. The flower is an Ixia, commonly sold by the name of candy chimes. I had to twine the heavy flower heads together into a bunch to support each other.
I never can remember the name of this one. It is good value plant because it drops it seeds and pops up around the yard. Very pretty but it does not smell nice.It smells a bit like cat pee.
This blurry picture is of a port wine magnolia in flower. I have had it for several years and it was originally purchased here and Canberra on a visit when we lived in Junee. So you could say it has come home. It isn't the most spectacular of plants but its perfume is absolutely heavenly.I sat it near the table out the back so we could all enjoy it's smell.
The picture above is of some lovely flowers that Mum bought for me when we went to the Fyshwick markets last week. They are pink paper daisies and Waratahs. Gorgeous Aussie natives. The pot they are in is one I made probably 5 years ago. The hand print is my daughters so I call the pot "Annie's hands" I think I hand built it then threw it on the wheel to smooth it off.

This is the wisteria that is growing at each end of the veranda at the back of my house. I didn't like it at first because I thought that the smell would be overpowering when it flowered and I could see that it was strangling and would eventually destroy its support posts. Well I was proven wrong, the perfume has not been overpowering and it really beautiful and will shade the back of the house beautifully in the heat of the coming summer, but yes it is damaging and will eventually destroy the support posts on the back of the house.
I did not like this plant either when I first moved here, because it is planted under a big prunus tree and was straggly and stunted. But just look at these flowers. It is covered in them at the moment. I think it is an apple tree. But it's fruit will probably do no good because it is in the wrong spot.
This is a pot full of Granny's Bonnets or Aquilega that came with me from Junee. They are grown from seeds given to me by a friend, June, so I can remember her by them.
This is a Banksia rose on the side fence.The last photo below this one is of the variegated wallflower I bought with me from Junee. It is in a pot with some ugly looking prickly cactus that I also bought from Junee. But when they flower they are so gorgeous that they take your breath away and you just look at them and say Ahhh! I call them the one day cactus because the flowers open for one day only each bloom. The cactus flowers are quite large and a soft translucent shell pink.

Sunday Scribblings, Style.

G'Day,
Sunday Scribblings prompt for this weekend is "My Style".
Goodness me couldn't this become a big fat jumble of all the things that make us, us and each an individual.
Well that is my interpretation anyway. A question.
My writing style is up front from my memory and not my imagination. I like to think I write the way I would speak to you if I was talking to your face and telling you a story. It is full of my ideas not necessarily my absolute beliefs.
My clothes style is function over fashion. Always. I try to choose clothing that is suitable for everyday wear as I don't need "going out" clothes often.
Shoes the same, function over fashion, and I don't care if they cost heaps as long as they don't hurt.
Personality. I guess some one else's judgment of this might be more correct than my take on it but, I like to think of myself as gentle, a nature lover, creative but not artistic and a stoic A bit impatient depending on the circumstance. Half and half a believer in things unseen or curious about them anyway. Sometimes secretive about myself and my feelings and needs.And protective of my likes. I want them all to myself, like my pottery.
Colors, I hate murky mixed up colours and love bright ones and also transparent and translucent pastels. Especially reds , purples and the blue greens that you see looking at the ocean from above.They take my breath away and bring tears to my eyes.Mushy mushy. :)
If you read my blog you already know I love plants and animals and taking pictures of them.
Um, this is going nowhere. I will post it anyway just because it is sharing a bit about me.Anyway who said I have to have a point to make when I write, is that part of the rules? I can just write.Yeah.

Last day of Floriade, Geosience open day.

G'Day,
Today is my father's birthday. He would have been 88 if he was still alive today. I think about him every day.
Today was the last day of Floriade. It closed at 5.30 today. I went to visit it on the very first day, half way through and on the very last day. Today I tried to take pictures of different things other than just close up shots of the Tulips. The picture above is a closer look at a flower head from a Gymea lily in an arrangement with other native flowers.The flower head was close to 2ft across.
Black pansies in one of the flower beds.
Looking across one of the beds. I was really pleased to find that the horticulturalists were able to design the beds so that they would continue fully flowered for the whole month that Floriade has run for. The first week I went there were very few Tulips in flower and it was mostly the understory of flowers that were out.
This was part of a great Bonsai exhibition there. The trees are Bonsai specimens of a grove of Paper bark trees, which are Australian Natives.
This is one of the sponsored design displays of a natural rock pool and garden, showing water wise plants and landscaping. This would have fitted perfectly in a spot in my Junee garden and looked wonderful . It was my favorite of the display gardens. The stuff floating on the water surface is seeds and the fluff that makes the seeds airborne from the birch trees, it was floating on the air everywhere. It was just as annoying as the willow trees droping their airborne seeds in spring time in the centre of Wagga.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think this is a dogwood tree in flower.Pretty.
Another look from further back of the big wildflower arrangement which the Gymea Lily , pictured earlier came from. The pic above is of the flower head at the bottom of this display.
This afternoon I also went along to the National Geoscience open day. It is an annual event and well worth a sticky beak. I enjoyed looking around at the rock samples and activities they had going. The kids visiting there especially enjoyed partaking in the fossil cast making, the gold and saphire panning and the pet rock making. They also had a siesmograph there with a pad that the kids could jump onto and watch the needle jump in response. The little boys really made good use of that one. :) Mum and I sat down in the theatre and listened to a presentation on "What is under the Ocean?". It was really interesting. Some facts and figures I remember are;
30% of the earth's surface is land, 70% is under the sea.
We only have recorded around 2 million species of the flora and fauna on this planet. There are estimated that there are between 5 and 22 million of them . The biggest percentage of these are in the oceans.
There were 3D topographical maps there of the Australian territories which were really interesting.
The ocean area that is classed as being owned by Australia is over twice the size in area that our land mass is.
Australias area takes up 4% of the earths surface.
School holidays is finished and the kids go back to school tomorrow. So, we will be back to our usual cleaning routine.
I visited the Dr about 4 months ago to ask about getting my sun related skin damage seen to and he sent me to a specialist dermatologist. The appointment is this Tuesday, I don't know what to expect but I think there are a few spots that might need cutting out.I have had 4 cut out before and dozens of pre cancerous lesions frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Ouchy. The Dr said that now they put a cream on the spots instead of freezing them so that is a big improvement, though he said something about it making your skin go red for a while. Dunno. I guess I will find out what happens on Tuesday.

Sunday Scribblings, Another time & place.

G'Day,
Sunday Scribblings prompt for this week is something like, at what time in history would you have liked to live if you could choose, why and where.
I have been thinking hard on this one as most of my responses to the Sunday Scribblings prompts let me use things from my memory but this one requires me to use my imagination. So I have been reading the writings of others who have written for their ideas.
Anthony North wrote in part about reincarnation. I thought I would follow along from his idea and write something about that.
When my children were toddlers they often came out with things that made me wonder if they had lived another life. When my daughter was between the ages of two and three she went through a phase where she would get really upset without me being able to work out what was going on. She would sit quietly playing with something and thinking and then would start questioning me what had happened to her other Mummy and where and who she was. I would ask her what she meant and she would say the Mummy I had before you. Then she would get upset and cry. Freaky.
My second son also around the same age would come out with words that I thought he was making up. One day he pointed at the fruit on the bench top and said Pome. From then on he started calling apples and pears, pome. I don't speak anything but English but I understand through gardening that Pome is similar to the french word for apple or pear.I am sure that he was too young to have either learnt or heard anyone else call apples that.
My husband when he was young went back packing around New Zealand. While he was there he visited Christchurch and was surprised to find he knew the place despite never being to New Zealand before in his life. He knew his way around the town and when asked directions from other people was able to guide them exactly to where they wanted to go without thinking about it. Pete, as I know him is not that good at finding his way around new places.
My other idea on this prompt was reactions I have had to movies that show other cultures. I am drawn to and moved by movies that show indigenous people down trodden and loosing their culture.When the movie is on the side of the conquering culture I feel sympathy for the indigenous culture. In the old cowboy and Indian movies I used to cry for the Indians. A movie that really upset me was "Once were Warriors". A New Zealand movie about a family of Maoris who were struggling in today's society with alcohol, violence, domestic and sexual abuse and the resulting suicide of one of their children. So maybe I would like to have lived in one of these cultures before the advent of white settlement came to them.
I guess that is being romantic and that I am wearing shutters on my eyes because I know from history that these cultures were sometimes brutal with much fighting between regional clans or tribes but I still think that it would have been great to see their customs and culture. Also before the time of white settlement, both here in Australia, or New Zealand or the Americas, these countries flora and fauna would have been less interfered with and damaged than it is today and I would have liked to have been able to see what that was like before the times we are living in now. As far as the food that they would have had in those days though, I don't know about that! I don't think I could stomach the foods that they had to eat. If I was living in those times I guess there would be no choice and I would not know any better.
O.K that is about all that I can think of tonight.
Good Night
Love Linda.

Canberra Botanic gardens

I love the way this tree branches out from the ground. Can't remember it's name.
This is the Paper bark forest. As the name suggests these trees have papery bark.
This is just one of the many grevillea flowers in flower at the gardens. The flowers on this one are about 8cm long.
My favourite Australian flowering plant of all time. The gymea lily or properly called, Doryanthes Excelsior. Aren't they wonderful. They look like something that you would have seen in a dinosaur movie. Huge. These plants are tough and grow along just inland from the eastern coast of Australia. They don't like it inland and are quite fussy where they grow otherwise.I don't know about western Australia though. When you drive through the Royal National park just south of Sydney they are scattered throughout the bush everywhere. Nowadays they are often seen planted along the median strips and roadsides around Sydney.
Another type of wattle. I particularly liked the way that the leaves were arranged on this specimen. They were stiff and spiky on the tips.
This is a small Waratah bush. They grow much bigger than this one. This is another plant that was difficult to grow in gardens until they grafted it. You can now get it it white and yellow and pink. I think its natural form is red and maybe the white specimen. The best specimen I ever saw of one of these was outside the front door of the cafe at the Sublime point lookout on the escarpment below the Sydney Royal National park. The flowers on it must have been 40 or 50cm across, and absolutely perfect.
This is the waratah again. Other, proper name is telopea. I think this specimen is indigenous to the Braidwood area.
A white waratah. A bit worse the wear but you get the idea.
This pretty red flower is called a net flower. It is on a small tree.I had not seen this before, the flower heads were a bit bigger than 10 cm across.
The spectacular Sturt's Desert Pea. The flowers on this one were about12 cm long. The size varies, probably depending on how happy it is with its conditions. I have seen bigger ones.
This shows the form of the plant. It is a low growing creeper type of thing which grows on sandy splaces like outback sand dunes or I have seen it on bare stony hard ground too. I talked to a lady in a road house years ago about this plant ( it grew in the area) and she was complaining how there is much less of it around than she used to see years ago because travellers would see it and stop to pick the flowers and therefore take the precious seeds away with them.Seed which wouldn't grow anywhere else easily anyway.
This pretty little bell was about 4cm long and I don't know what it was called either.
This one was a small low growing shrub.
Another one I can't name.Tiny flowers, less than a cm across.
Don't know the name of this but it was a big flower head, probably 10cm across, soft and fluffy.
Another one I can not name.Tiny flowers , delicate, about a cm across.
This is one of the everlastings. I have tried to grow these several times but never had any luck with them. The flower was about 4 or 5 cm across. For anyone who doesn't know these they usually grow one flower to a stem, up to 2 ft high and the petals are crisp and papery. You can dry them upside down in bunches and use them for dried flower arrangements easily. They will keep their color dried for ever. They come up in the desert and grasslands everywhere after rain in springtime to form beautiful wildflower carpets. I remember when I was a child not being able to resist wandering off into them to pick them. Once when we were driving from Darwin to Alice Springs I wandered off up a hill full of them and my family drove off without me thinking I was in the car. I was 9 yrs old. Picking wildflowers is strictly forbidden nowadays.
A pink everlasting daisy.
And a large yellow one. The flower on this is about 7 or 8 cm across.
This is a closer look at the Hardenbergia. It is also known as a Sarsaparilla.There were lots of plants around the garden with flowers in this pea form. I saw yellow, orange, white and red pea flowers on different plants. Some were bushes and others creepers and vines.You can also get a darker purple hardenbergia and a white one.
This is a Banksia flower. There are many different banksias in Australia and they are in the same family as Proteas which come from Africa. this one was around 35cm tall.
This is a seed pod that forms after the banksia flower is finished. This is not the same plant as the previous picture but the seed pod is similar. There is a series of famous children's stories by May Gibbs in which these seed pods are a character called "Big Bad Banksia Men". Many of the wood seed capsules look like scary faces.
Banksia seed pods only open after they are burnt in a bush fire and the seed won't germinate until after it has been burnt. Lots of our native plants have adapted to their environment similarly.
This is the famous Geralton Wax flower. It is a native to western australia originally and was hard to grow out of it's natural area until botanists grafted it onto a tougher roots stock making it available to home gardeners around the country.I had one of these doing beautifully in my Junee garden. Well, just look at it who would be without one. My plant in Junee flowered for 7 months of the year.
Don't know the name of this one either.The delicate flowers were 3cm across.
Don't know what this little bush is either.

This is a Hardenbergia. It is a vine or ground cover and is a popular garden plant here. Drought tolerant and tough.
Don't know what this one is called but it is in the asteracea family.
A Hibbertia.
Above is the National Carillon. It was playing while I was there yesterday morning. It has 55 bells and was a gift from the British Government to commemorate Canberra being 50 years old. It is on a little island in Lake Burley Griffin. Walter Burley Griffin was the bloke who planned the layout of Canberra.
Lake Burley Griffin. Looking back towards the city from beside the Carillon.
This is the Rainforest gully in the Botanic Gardens. Beautiful!
This is the tropical garden inside the glasshouse.
Don't know what this is called but it was pretty. The flowers were about 5cm long.
Please enbiggen the pictures for a better look.
It is Friday morning here. A bit cool inside but I am sure it is lovely outside in the sun, I have not been out there yet.
Yes! I went to the Botanic Gardens yesterday. Mum and I spent about 5 hours there. I absolutely loved it. Everything is either in flower or threatening to burst into flower in celebration of the new spring season. Lovely.I walked around everywhere and took pictures of all the flowers. My camera memory kept getting full so I had to stop several times to cull out the photos that were not so good so that I could keep taking more photos. He he. I now know that my memory card holds 75 pictures. I want a bigger one! We had lunch in the cafe there again, so I have designated Hudson's cafe as my new favorite place to have lunch here in Canberra.
The gardens here are dedicated to all Australian native plants. I read in the pamphlet that it contains 7000 of the 17,500 species of flora indigenous to this country. It is divided up into sections dedicated to specific areas like the Mallee, the Sydney area, the rain forest gully's, rock garden, Tasmanian rain forests, woodlands and grasslands and there is a few glasshouses that display tropical plants. That is not all of them just some.There are are also areas dedicated to specific genus. My favorites were in flower for me to ogle at too, some waratahs and banksias and the lovely paper or everlasting daisys were flowering in white pink and yellow. The spectacular Sturts Desert pea was flowering in big pots. They are very special needs plants and come from the desert areas inland so I thought it was great to see them here in Canberra. It is amazing what you can get to grow by tweaking special soil and climate conditions to suit. And the most spectacular one of all, Doryanthes Excelsior, commonly known as the gymea lily. Gymea is a suburb of Sydney.
I had better go do some cleaning as I have a house inspection next wednesday. I hope this does not put everyone off being such a long post about nothing but flowers.
Bye Love Linda.