Road Trip to Canberra

A long day on the road. Roughly eight hours driving, plus rest stops, with a GPS that was giving us odd directions, made for a tiring day with few photographs taken.

Proof that we weren't at home:

A magpie in Albury - note the black back, instead of the white that we see at home.

More proof we weren't at home:

"Neapolitan" flavoured milk! It tastes, as you might expect, like melted neapolitan ice-cream. Purchased at Aldi in Albury, not seen anywhere else. But one does wonder why Aldi named their flavoured cow's milk brand after a male sheep?

Final proof we were away:

The obligatory stop at the Dog of the Tuckerbox. The sun was low by that point, and directly behind the dog, so photos were not easy.

We were lucky that daylight saving started yesterday, as it gave us extra daylight driving, and we managed to get to Canberra before peak kangaroo time. The Hume highway is littered with corpses of every type of wildlife. It is horrible to see, and a constant reminder not to drive on country roads from dusk on.

We arrived at our motel just as their kitchen was closing, but fortunately they managed to rustle up a couple of meals and deliver them to our room, so we didn't have to go out again. Phew!

Illabarook Field Trip

Today we took a trip to Illabarook (where?) to visit two sites, the Illabarook Rail Reserve and Illabarook Nature Conservation Reserve. I'd never heard of Illabarook before, but it isn't that far from home if you could fly there. It is about 30km in a straight line, but by road it is over 50.

This is the rail reserve:

 And this is the conservation reserve:

Neither of them look particularly promising at first glance. But each is full of tiny flowers, moths, caterpillars, spiders, and the occasional bird. It was a bit of a grey day, with rain threatening (despite not being forecast), so the pictures are a bit dull. But here are a few of the things we saw:

Several varieties of sundews:

Although most had only buds, no flowers yet.

A pallid cuckoo which every now and then pounced down to the ground and then back up onto the fence

with one of these in its mouth:

A big hairy caterpillar. I don't know what the caterpillars were eating, as they were much bigger than most of the plants.

A tiny fringe-lily full of water:

Fascinating texture on a fungus:

Common rice-flower

A host of golden... orchids:

It was hard to know sometimes if we were looking at different species of orchid, or if they just looked different because the raindrops were causing the petals to clump up.

A parrot-pea:

Although which parrot-pea it was no-one could decide as it didn't quite match the descriptions in the guide book:

And finally, something much larger at home. A tulip update:

The first layer of tulips (the pale pink ones) have started losing their petals. The middle layer (burgundy with pointy petals) are all looking good. And the third layer (which seemed to be orange but are more of a coral pink) are nearly all open.

Twelfth

This is the 12th charity quilt I have quilted:

 It's been a while since the 11th one back in June.

Strictly speaking this is not a quilt; it does not have three layers. There is the pieced top, and a polar fleece backing, and nothing in between. This was an experiment, but I don't think I will do it again. The polar fleece quilts up fine, but it picks up every bit of thread and dog hair and lint and just looks bad.

Back view so you can see the quilting:

It is really a much darker blue than it appears in the photo.

90

I obviously have some sort of mental block when it comes to family occasions and photographs. I either have flat batteries in my camera, or no camera, or forget to take photos until everyone is leaving. This time my camera had been put away at the other end of the house, which I only realised as the candles were being lit on my mother's birthday cake. Fortunately my phone was close by, so I grabbed that to get a couple of shots. But that meant taking pictures without a flash of people sitting in front of a bright window.

So I ended up with photos only slightly better than silhouettes. I've lightened these up as well as I can, but they are not brilliant.

Time to blow out the candles:

Orchid Gift

Today I had to take a drive to buy a gift for my sister to give to my mother for her birthday, but I think I ended up with the best gift:

Two pots of orchids! I admired the garden of the lady who was selling the item I'd gone to buy, and in response she gave me these two beauties. I offered, but she wouldn't accept any money for them. The cymbidium on the right had just finished flowering, but it has a magenta-coloured bloom. It is an offset from an orchid she has had since the 1980s, which was given to her by an elderly neighbour.

The dendrobium is covered in flowers and buds:

These flowers have a lovely perfume. My car smelt great by the time I got them back home.

Now both are in the greenhouse. A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of buds on our existing dendrobium. Look at it now:

Also in the greenhouse, the flower spike on "Ron's orchid" that I showed the beginnings of in July is very close to opening. So expect more orchid pictures soon.

The Forsythia Saga

Each month at their meetings the local Horticultural Society run a little fund-raising activity. The prize is, unsurprisingly, a plant. Last night I was happy to see that the prize was a forsythia, as we have been looking for one for a while without success. So with that tempting prize we bought a few more tickets than usual.

And look what happened:

I had the winning ticket!

After that experience I knew exactly what 1-Across was in the Guardian crossword this morning:

Yes, it was this morning, even though it has yesterday's date. Due to time zone differences I'm always doing the previous day's puzzle.

Then later in the day we were notified an order from an online nursery was ready to collect. And look what was in the order:

A teeny-tiny forsythia! I did not know about this order when purchasing give-away tickets last night. So now we need to find spots for two forsythias.

Springing

A touch of orange:

The first of the third layer of tulips is opening, and it appears to be orange! I'm surprised how long the flowers are lasting. The first pink ones opened three weeks ago, and they still look pretty good.

More tulips elsewhere in the garden:

You know spring has arrived when you start seeing butterflies, but this one seems to have had quite a rough time:

Its wings are very tattered. But it seemed to be getting a good feed of nectar among the spring stars and the lavender:

And look! I hadn't noticed, but there is more blossom in the orchard.

Cherry blossom:

And a nashi pear: