Oh Melbourne weather how did you know....?

On this overcast, damp and dank Melbourne morning I marvel at how relaxed and content I am feeling.  I have always loved this weather, light drizzle, the smell of the damp earth wafting through the doors and windows.

And even today as the true grieving process begins to set in I look out of the window here and am energised by the vividness of the colours in this grey light.  


The walnut leaves look an emerald green, the zygocactus reds above are glowing and the enormous flowers give shelter to a tiny moth.  The white ornithogalums are positively fluorescent. 

I can see the new growth on the Japanese maple tinged a pinkish orange against the rich greenery around it.  It is all breathtaking.  Life is everywhere.  Birds continue to nest, snails leave their silvery trails on the ground.

In other spots of the garden the red and the yellow Arum lillies are beginning to shoot.  I don't know which is which - I never remember and it is like a surprise every year.  My friend loved those lillies and I even gave her some bulbs to grow her own just last year. I remember how excited she was on the phone telling me that they were flowering.  At 79 she still derived joy from the simplest things - a savage lesson to all of us who get caught up in the silliness of the world.

Beneath this grey, grey sky, nature wreaks her magic and my heart swells with contentment and wonder.

The irises erupted this morning in the wet - opening their multiple arms to catch the drops.












The staghorn reaches out to funnel refreshing water into its bowels and I watched as the rivulets darkened the grey bark of the walnut trunk below as the overflow ran down to refresh the cyclamen and ferns beneath the canopy.  Such an organised, socialist system of order as there is in the plant world - none are neglected.


And, saluting another day, the agapanthus spikes reach skyward growing visibly to me by the hour.

I marvel at how quickly my juvenile garden is embracing the breaking drought and the long missed joy of rain.  A decade of dryness and harshness.  A decade of replacing plants that have succumbed.  But now the new growth can be measured in feet instead of inches - as in the past years.  Now the garden beds will begin to fill out. Garden beds that are lined with the trunks of Tree ferns that could not survive in the arid and waterless conditions they were subjected to.  I could not bear to mulch them or cut them up so they now proudly stand guard and contain the unruliness of the herbaceous plants on one side and the ornamental grasses on the other.  Their majestic trunks are now horizontal but a reminder of the circle of life.

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