More Flowers

Today is the first day of Spring. We have certainly been noticing the Spring weather this week, as have many of our neighbours. The local playground has been much busier than it was over Winter. While we do occasionally stop there, most of our neighbourhood walks are just that: walks. We wander along at a toddler's pace, examining random flowers and rocks along the way. There have certainly been a lot more flowers recently.

One day in particular, we walked along our street and found a lot of flowering weeds on the verge. "Flowers!" cried E. "More flowers!" She'd take a couple of steps... "More flowers!" Because they were weeds, I let her pick some. Another day, we were doing much the same thing in our backyard, and again E ended up with a handful of flowers (weeds). We went out into the front yard and found more flowers and E was quite excited. A neighbour, who was also out  in her front garden, let E pick as many of her 'flowers' (more weeds) as she liked.

We do also have somewhat intentional flowers in our gardens, such as the nectarine blossoms, eggplant, rocket and kai laan flowers and a couple of little pea flowers, all in the backyard. I can't remember the names of the plants that we have in our front garden, but many of them are now in flower, too. There's little purple flowers on some grassy plants and little red flowers on some sort of succulent. There's also a big, fuzzy bush that looks like it's going to flower, for the first time, perhaps this week.

Birds have been quite active around the place with all this Spring weather. We often see green parrots land on our back fence and there have been a lot of pink galahs around, too. There are also a couple of families of magpies that stalk a local park and the roundabout at the end of our street. I haven't seen any of the black cockatoos lately. I know they're quite rare, but there was a flock of them that lived in the local scrub. Unfortunately, a lot of the scrub has been bulldozed to make way for more houses. We people take up a lot of space.

Our garden is also full of insect life. While pulling weeds the other day, we came across some fuzzy caterpillars, some black beetles, some little ants and a whole bunch of different bugs that I can't name. We also have green caterpillars and slugs and tiny little pointy-shelled snails. They all like to eat our veggies. There are crickets and grasshoppers and butterflies and flies. We have found many different spiders. I'd rather not have the red-backs, but the rest are okay. We were quite happy to find a couple of ladybugs the other day. E likes to watch the bees collect pollen, possibly because they're always on the prettiest flowers.

E and I were out in our front garden again this morning and picked even more flowers. I really should do something about those weeds. :)

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Okay, I meant to post this a couple of days ago, obviously, as it's no longer the first day of Spring. I am sitting by our back door, right now, watching a storm. It's a storm that's supposed to be worse tomorrow and is affecting pretty much the whole West coast of Australia. E and I did get outside for a bit this morning, before the storm hit, and E collected one more bunch of 'wild-flowers'. Sounds much nicer than 'weeds' doesn't it?

Happy Spring!

-Polly