Veronika Wild

The true blue Lechenaultia We are getting some lovely weather at last and carpets of flowers are starting to appear. I especially like those unbelievably blue ones, be they in gardens or in nature. I turned our snails loose this morning, thinking that they had suffered enough in the name of science, not to mention that I seemed to be the only person who was still feeding them. That’s another good thing about snail pets. There’s no problem releasing them back into the wild. The small ones were now twice as big as when we first got them and possibly getting a bit big for their strawberry box homes. Blue Lady The council here has been doing its annual kerbside collection of hard rubbish lately – that’s the stuff that won’t fit into the bin. What a treat it was. A bonanza of lounge suites, old chairs, outgrown bikes, hot water cylinders, broken prams, useful building materials, old tiles. We would have killed as children to have been let loose in a treasure trove like th...

Which way would you go? The track is actually down hill, a little to the left and then runs off to the right - impossible to tell coming from the top Sunday, September 2015. I finally did it! Late in the day, I sneaked up on the Waverley Flora Reserve from the rear (south west)   - the way you were supposed to go and discovered all the places where I went wrong before. The track went through open woodland which appears to have suffered greatly due to fire and being too close to habitation. Nevertheless, at least three kinds of wattle were in bloom including one which I had never seen before and there were a few banksias as well as the ubiquitous sheoaks - some of which may well have been he -oaks . Curiously he -oaks are  the ones without little balls. They are a very ancient species which survive drought by having very tiny leaves enclosed by needles. One other curious discovery - a large pile of old scallop shells (see bottom pic). Could these have been part o...