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.

Sunday Scribblings, Forbidden.

G'Day,
Here is my little bit of Sunday Scribblings writing for this week.
The word forbidden is an invitation.
Tell any child, or adult for that matter that something is forbidden and what do they want to do. Well, they want to know why and then if they are a bit curious or adventurous, try the forbidden out for themselves.
I think it is a quirk of human nature.
A quirk proven by the biblical story of Adam and Eve.And Yes I know that there is much more to the story than that, it is most certainly a contributing factor.

A quirk of our nature that advertising companies know well and use to their advantage. What better publicity is there than bad publicity and the interest it can bring to a subject?
If there is such a thing as the devil, he uses it to his advantage too, doesn't he.
I remember when I was in my early years of High School in the 70's, sex and drug education was taboo and forbidden by many parents. Around that time we were all given a book that was called "The Little Red School Book" which held information on the subjects. Well there was a great uproar throughout the country and it became a political score point. The little red school book ended up being banned and we all had them confiscated. Which of course made the knowledge held within it's pages of great interest to us.
I recently saw a copy of it in the National Archives here in Canberra and had to smile at the silliness of it all.You are never going to stop your kids from growing up by protecting them from the world, all you manage to do by not educating them about such subjects is make them curious, and ignorant.
Forbid something and it becomes coveted.

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These pictures are more of the Floriade ones I took last week. Probably not a support for this prompt but I like em' anyway.
Today I went to the botanical gardens here in Canberra. They are dedicated to Australian Flora and because it is spring they are at their absolute glorious peak. I only had a couple of hours to spend but I definitely will go back, with my camera, and soon, while everything is in flower. There was a family of water dragons wandering around and sunning themselves on the rocks by the water features there. I think I counted over a dozen of them and several of them were quite big. They didn't seem to be to worried by the human visitors, though they where watching, and ready to get out of the way if they felt threatened. There were lots of birds too and I heard a black cockatoo calling out but I couldn't see it although I was looking carefully.
We had a nice Sunday lunch in the cafe there amongst the lovely gardens.
Oh yes I definitely have to go back there! :)

My Quirks, Floriade 08

G'Day,
Last week I was tagged by Goddess Diana to do a thingy about Quirks. I didn't really know what to write and I was in a bit of a negative mood when I received it but I have been thinking about it and I reckoned I would just do it without thinking about it too much so.....
UM! Quirks, I don't think I have that many but others might think so. I am just plain old me!.
The Rules are as follows;
1. Link the person who tagged you.
Here she is, http://godesscat.blogspot.com/
2.Mention the rules on your blog. Voila.
3.Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours.
4.Tag 6 bloggers and link to them.
I tag; Bimbimbee who is on my sidebar as Annie.
Krissie who is on my sidebar.
Merle on my sidebar .
Martha, on my side bar .
Sorrow on my side bar too.
Shadow same place.
Which leads me to the quirks.
1.
The first one I choose to list here is my use or should I say misuse of today's technology. I will only learn what I want to, to just get by and do the things I want. It confuses me and my mind goes dumb if I try to go further. For an example see the way I have provided the links for this quiz. Also, a case in point I don't have a mobile phone or a GPS and I neither need or want either. I can read maps and I couldn't really be bothered with a tiny phone that I can not work, makes me contactable and makes lots of money for some big rip off company.
2.
I always read the number plates on other cars in the traffic and make up silly rhymes or sayings out of them. The letters on my number plate are YGB. Pete made this one up but he says it is "You Good Boy". TVP = textured vegetable protein, funny what they can make out of soy beans nowadays eh! Tvp was a common plate seen around Wagga.
3.
I beat myself up over the stupid things I do. I have always been very hard on myself and even when I was a small child my Mum said when I did something wrong I would always give myself up and chastise myself. When I do something I always question myself and whether I was right or wrong to do it. At the moment I have lost confidence in my driving skills after rude people have been mean to me in the traffic. I bet though they do just as many mistakes as me but that is a different story all together. I know every time I drive somewhere people make mistakes too and I am not rude to them. I haven't had a crash since I was 17, except scraping a guidepost while reversing during a violent thunderstorm once. I bet not everyone can boast the same!
4.
I take pictures of flowers and animals. Lots of them. And I look through them over and over again. I love them. I guess this can be attributed to my love of nature. When I was a small child we had a big book by reader's digest with lots of animal pictures and I prided myself on knowing the names of each and every one of them. Even the big picture of the snake that I used to tease and freak out my big sister with by flashing it at her. That page mysteriously disappeared.He he.
5.
I don't follow recipes. When I look at recipes it is only to get the idea, then I can't resist tweaking it and playing around with it to experiment. This has led to many disasters but lots of fun and lots of successes too. From doing this I have a repertoire of recipes inside my head that are my regulars.I can't tell you measurements but it is usual to go by the words "until it looks right"
6.
Well number 6, how did I get here so easily, I must have lots of quirks that I never thought about.
I am fiercely Australian and love to show off my quirkiness using the Australian twist on the English language in my speech and here in my writing. I find using it this way very amusing, especially when I see that others don't understand it and scratch their heads and look puzzled. Maybe that shows a sense of belonging to my culture and being proud of it.When I was in my teens and living in Singapore someone nick named me "Bushie" and I loved that. ( Bushie meaning someone who comes from the bush)
Right that is it. The rest of this post is dedicated to some of the flower pictures I took last Friday at Floriade. TULIPS! of course. Beautiful tulips, thrice the size of the paltry specimen that is flowering in the back yard at the moment. Even though that is pretty it doesn't hold a candle to the ones at Floriade.


Pristine single white tulips.
Tightly wrapped blood red and white streaked tulips.
Translucent bright red tulips with black centres.
Pansies that are of the deepest purple, so dark that from a distance they look black.A bit more of my obsession with finding black flowers.Enlarge this one to see the water droplets. It was mid morning when I took this and the garden beds were being watered.
Daffodils. Big ones in different sizes and colour combinations.
And artists poppies. I love them. Ha ha ha, a picnic full of flowers. And I am sounding like the count off sesame street except with flowers as my favourite subject instead of numbers.
And the last one for today a bright purple tulip.
Lovely!
Today I am tired after a busy week of extra work at different school around town doing the school holiday cleaning. My index finger is sore from using it so much. I jokingly said this morning that I had RSI in it but it probably a bit more of that annoying bloke Arthur. As in Arthur- itis.
I have had all day off today but I still have to go and clean our regular office shortly which does not have school holidays, unfortunately. So... I better get off here and get ready. And... have another up of tea before I go.
Bye. Love Linda