Divine daphne and Notting Hill

I can't help thinking that this is Nature's way of helping us get through these final weeks of Winter.
Poke your nose in there and all of a sudden the bleakness and cold doesn't seem quite so bad.
One wonders how a plant can produce a fragrance so intoxicating. 
It is such an unremarkable shrub in any other season.
Jamesy, the white one you gave us a few years ago is flowering for the first time. 
Thank you Ibby......the two other sprigs are from the pot of daphne you gave us in February. I adore them both.
The deliciously sweet fragrance has been wafting through the kitchen from the moment I brought it inside.....

That is, until Bill started cooking this afternoon with this....

 .....his all time favourite addition to many dishes.

Mind you, I'm loving the smell of the garlic cooking too......

Some beautiful colour out there today to keep us smiling.

  

Even daffodils coming up in the rubble amongst the prickles and weeds....love it!

This small tree in our little native patch out the front has succumbed to the gale force winds over the past few days. Perhaps it might be the perfect time to include more leucadendrons instead. 

They are not native to Australia but are closely related to many of our native plants and have the same hardiness ( according to my new favourite Weekly Times source). I must visit the nursery when it stops blowing!

Bill has finished pruning out the dead wood from our banksia rose hedge.

 The archway is bare now. Bill just looked over my shoulder and said oh, the archway  ( concrete reinforcement ) is bent. I better get out there and fix it! 

Perhaps it will one day look like this again.

My granny squares quilt so far. I am still deciding whether to stop there or do more.

So..........in the meantime........

...... I brought out this little pile of brightness ( squirreled away in my sewing cupboard for a rainy day) to have a play with. It is from a collection called Notting Hill.

I also have an amazing gadget (ruler) that makes half square triangles a breeze. You start with two strips like this .....

Sew down both sides..... cut like this....

and you end up with this.

 I am going to arrange them in a special way to make a zigzag quilt.

So the dining room  will remain my Winter sewing room for a while.

Our sheds are arriving next Wednesday!!

 Bill will be beside himself!

Boomer and orange juice

 We had a late afternoon visitor to our backyard yesterday.  Just a grey blob from our back door so Bill needed to use his camera to zoom in. A big fellow but strangely all by himself. 

We watched him for ages happily grazing on all the lovely green growth out there.
 From our discoveries this morning he obviously came right in to the rose garden for a better look when we closed the curtains!

Thank you Cheryl. You are very kind. We will get something special to put in our garden.

Up until recently we have struggled to reach a final tally of burnt trees, shrubs and plants that have not survived, because we were always hopeful that much of our garden would eventually come back to life. And it has. But there are still many plants and trees that haven't had the energy to revive and flourish and we needed to make an inventory of these.
It is only when you visit the nurseries to price the cost of replacing them all, that you realise how much money our gardens are worth in monetary terms......all of our gardens not just ours. And of course it's the years of growing that are priceless, especially 27 years of growth in many of our boundary trees.
 No wonder the garden is often a deal breaker in the sale or purchase of many country properties. All those huge established gums that you see on old farms that provide shelter and beauty to a property.

Many of those gum trees around the fence line are not there anymore and it seems as though most of our orchard is not going to recover either. I think the new growth I discovered  straight after the fire was all part of their shock mode.

I just need a bit more red.....is what I told Bill on my way to the patchwork shop. Well that was never going to happen was it? As if I could come out of there with just red!!

I need to finish off the blocks for my granny squares quilt. so I can get started on something else

Thank goodness for Face time.
 We talk/watch/ listen to this little boy every week, sometimes twice, sometimes three times. He is learning his colours. He calls orange .....orange juice! Bless him. (How long 'til Christmas????)

Purple day and Bali wedding

Grape hyacinths always make me think that Spring is just around the corner. Looks like the rabbits have been chomping on the foliage.

The alyssum is still blooming it's head off in the rubble......

.......and this gorgeous pink pin cushion (hakea) was blooming it's head off in Bill White Snr's garden in Geelong. We have tried growing this one several times but they keep drowning or don't like the clay soil....or both.

Video of Sam's and Kiann's Wedding (please follow the link)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wdn9tbnbcokn3w6/Sam%20%26%20Kian%20MV%20Clip%20720.mp4

Watching this video is all it takes for memories of Bali to come flooding back! Sam and Kiann just received it a couple of weeks ago.

Not sure whether or not I have been able to get it to work on my blog.

Just checked...it's not very sharp unfortunately.

Remember to turn the sound on.

We are hoping there might be some action here next week!