A FEW SNIPPETS FROM THE GARDEN AND SOME MEMORIES

As I have previously said this summer has been incredibly hot and unrelenting but we have survived!

March is normally beautiful where we are, warm days with cool nights, with a slight chill creeping in with the morning light. We have day light saving until the end of the month and even with this when we wake the mornings are slowly becoming darker. 

Through all the heat the flowers have kept appearing, often with sizzled leaves but still bravely poking their petals out of their buds.

When we went out with the dogs last thing one night, the moon was out, a slight breeze bringing the warm summer grass scent, which I adore, this magnolia, a Little Gem was literally glowing in the dark.

This velvety dark red rose is so scented that when we walk past we get the deliciousness of it wafting past us. However hard I try though I can never get the colour of it quite right with my camera. It is more like these petals below, a lovely snippet of the streaks of white left as the petals drop. In fact something in between I think.

A leaf swinging on it's fine spider web rope.

The same pelagonia is the same as the above, but the first flower we had. The leaves are very pretty too. It was from a cutting from a pot outside a cafe in Shepparton some time ago. The cafe sits next to a lake and park and we go there occasionally  for the view rather than the food. so nice to sit outside in the fresh air and see water.

My tea cosy nestled into the hydrangea flowers. I do struggle with my love for hydrangeas, they dislike the heat as much as I do and we wilt at the same rate. Me with my very pink face and the hydrangeas' leaves almost melting. They bring back lots of memories. My mother always had them in shaded spots on her verandah, loved picking them and bringing them inside for the table decoration. So the distinctive scent brings her back very easily to me. I grew up further north than where we are now and the summers all seemed to be very long and hot, no different to now I'm sure. No air conditioning either but we were blessed to have a wide creek below the house and then a river half a mile away as our boundary so we swam at every opportunity and my mother had water for her vegetable garden that fed us as well as her flowers. The joy of water too meant sometimes when she watered the pots on the verandah she watered the weather boards of the house and the concrete verandah received a good hose as well. This always cooled us down...and I still love paddling around cool wet concrete as I did back then.
I must add this was only when the creek was running, sometimes it was so dry that the water was limited....meaning we all took turns in the bath...not so good being the last one in! Any spare water was carried outside for the precious vegetables and only at the last would some water be sparingly poured on to the flowers. How it must have broken my mother's heart to see her precious flowers withering.
This post wasn't meant to morph into these memories but that is often what life does to us.
So there you are!!