Beautiful rain and lovely gifts

My  rounds of the garden were carried out in the rain tonight.......and it was wonderful!
The smell of the garden after rain is one of my favorites and I had almost forgotten what that was like.
The frog pond has water again and the horse paddocks look amazing. We have never seen them like that before.
We have had about 20mm overall....beautiful, steady, soaking rain. And the ducks thought it was Christmas!
I am hoping that Bill can finally get the fork into the ground around the pond now. I need to throw in  plant three buckets of bulbs I dug from a clump in the front garden bed last week.

 Up until a couple of days ago, the trusty crowbar wouldn't even make an impression.

A few years ago I received these little garden implements for Christmas. They are perfect for keeping in the kitchen garden which is just outside the laundry door. Somehow they remained untouched during the fire even though the laundry pipe nearby was blackened. These were the only small garden implements  we had for sometime after the fire.

There they are in the corner.

Today we received these.......

Bill is thrilled with his spade....something to do with the sharp, flat edge apparently. And I love my new little trowel and fork. Merrill knows me well....she also gave me the green handled ones! The knee pad was on our  "must get" list and one can never have too many gardening gloves.
Thank you for your kindness Merrill and Kevin.

And as if that wasn't enough in one day, these boxes of gorgeousness arrived crammed with herbs and beautiful little plants. I adore them.
Thank you Viv, my lovely friend.

This sweetly fragrant rose was planted before we arrived . I think it may be "Blue Moon".  I took this photo tonight. It looked so beautiful in the rain and evening light with bulbs popping up all around it. I am not that fond of the color but the perfume is divine. We can now start putting away the Australia Post tubs that had been left out for the birds and animals (thank you Amy). We have no idea how they remained untouched by the fire.....just another mystery.

We mustn't have taken a photo from that angle after the fire but the tub is still there and you can see the position of the birdhouse......

Love this!