Daily walks around the garden

It is the custom of my husband and I to take daily walks around our property. We both work at home, and are at computers a lot of that time, so we make sure we get outside, get some fresh air and vitamin D and some exercise too.  I rarely ever walk outside without a camera in hand, or, at the very least, my Samsung S8. But most times it’s one of my Nikons. There are always birds around, kookaburras, rosellas, magpies, honeyeaters and lately, ducks. The Wood Ducks are back and enjoying our overgrown lawn and the billabong – when the maggies chase them there from the garden.

We like to inspect the bushes, plants and flowers, even the fungi we find here and there. Sadly, today we discovered that the wallabies have been back. Where we had been able to block them from coming in, the neighbour had made some changes to the fencing, not realising why we had pegged the wire down. We also had a pile of pieces of wood along the bottom but they had been moved away where the wallabies had clearly pushed their way through under the fencing. We’ll have to peg it down again as the wallabies were back overnight, and ate almost all the buds off our native hibiscus that was getting ready to bloom, and the flowers off our beautiful Robyn Gordon Grevillea. I could cry. Looks like we’re going to have to invest in a lot of mesh to put around plants as otherwise nothing is going to get to grow! And we still have so much planting to do. The lack of rain this year hasn’t helped at all – that’s what brought them here, in the first place, looking for water and then, once they found our billabong, the new young tasty bushes and trees gave them further reason to stay. It’s been a few weeks since they were last here. Had hoped we’d get a lot more done before they came back. Sigh.

Below are some of the plants now in flower – including our camellia bush which is very, very late this year.

In order from left to right:
First row – Osteospermum Serenity Bronze, Hellebore, Erica Cerinthoides (which is looking really stunning in the front garden).
Second row: Cornea not quite yet opened, one of the first camellias on the bush by our kitchen window, and some jonquils.

As we walked around the paddock I noticed a White-throated Tree Creeper creeping up the side of a tree trunk, and I pointed out to my husband a magpie nest I’d been watching being built over the past week. Quite funny, really, the magpie adds more twigs and then sits in the nest and smooths it out with its bottom. I watched it move from side to side as it wiggled its butt. Never really thought about how they build a nest before. I watched the maggie arrive in the nest again this afternoon, but this time I think it was carrying food. The third image is of two of the six ducks that have been hanging around. Love seeing them here.

I so look forward to the time we have our paddock garden fully planted and growing so that visits from the wildlife of the nibbling type won’t be such a cause for concern.