Unusual Flowers in Spring at Willunga

 It was  lovely day today and to see the flowers now, after such a long and drawn out,wet spring
gave the urge to get out the camera and shoot away....
I think the water lilies have escaped their pots and consequently they are thriving with big leaves and stunning flowers. The goldfish are in droves too even though I found one of the big parent fish floating dead in the pond.I fished it out and buried it near a plant....

The bearded iris on the right is a tanny brown colour with a golden throat. It was given to me 30 years ago when I moved into my cottage at Watervale  by a friend from Tasmania. I have never seen another one of that colour. It is also inclined to flower in March as well as in October.I nearly lost it when the water restrictions came in but I managed to save it and will propagate it from now on.

The long wet spell we have had has encouraged a host of insects to breed up in large numbers.
Especially the earwigs which are such sneaky creatures as they eat voraciously at night when no one is watching and you find your plants full of holes and the roses damaged with the little buggers right inside the base of the bloom.
The next thing will be the caterpillars hatching after the lovely butterflies have laid their eggs on just about everything as well.....

Can you spot Mrs Tawney in our pepper tree?
She has been sitting on the same branch each morning for the past three weeks, so I greet her with "Good Morning Mrs Tawney" as I open the gate to go in and feed the chooks which is right there alongside the pepper tree. Mr Tawney is sitting on the nest in the Ash tree a few yards away and I noticed today his little chick is starting to poke its head out from under his Dad's chest.It is written in the bird books that the male sits on the nest, you wonder how someone found out that little fact......

All this Rain....

We are still having the most amazing cold and wet weather for September into  October this year. South Australia is usually the driest state in the driest continent, but this year it is making records in both rain and ferocity of winds. Last week our whole state was without power for anything of 12 hours to days on end for some of the outlying areas. Today again we are indoors as the winds blow and the rain comes lashing down. We are not as badly off as the poor  farmers in the Mid north and the vegetable growers on the Virginia plains which are flooded,or the Barossa valley, that wonderful wine growing area. The Onkaparinga river too, is flooding the lower areas and I am sure the bream are very happy if no one else is....
Sixty years ago in 1956, it was also a wet winter when my family lived on Anlaby sheep station and I was unable to cross the creeks to get to the school bus to go to Kapunda high. I missed so much schooling I failed my leaving certificate that year.

I did gain my certificate while studying for it when I was a lab technician at the Waite Institute the following year.
It is astounding that people still try to cross flooded roads not aware of the power of raging water and are left stranded in the middle of the creek, in their cars and have to be rescued.
 One year when we lived at Hughes Park, I watched from my kitchen window overlooking the Skillogalie creek which was a raging torrent after torrential rains and was tossing huge tree trunks around like matchsticks in the paddock. All the floodgates would have to be repaired as the debris would pile up against them and eventually drag them off the wires from which they hung.

The most useful thing I have done this week is make Quandong jam. They are such a lovely colour when ripe but it is lost when made into jam....such a shame.
This morning during a hailstorm, all the magpies and one young one sat on the Studio verandah taking shelter but the poor Tawney Frogmouth is stoically sitting on his nest while Mrs Tawney sits in the Pepper tree well sheltered under a bow near the chook yard....
There is a mangy fox lurking around too and kitten rabbits hopping around on the patio early in the morning.....their burrows flooded, pity they didn't drown......

Cards Anyone?

 I have had good fun making cards for the past week or so. It is still being creative but not overly so and it has kept me in the studio most days. It has helped that there are 52 CDs of all of Beethoven's works to listen too as well, while the weather has not been condusive to being outside for gardening.
We are also being faced with having to attend Flinders Hospital more often than we would like and that takes a lot of time and energy. Especially as the parking there is horrendous and you don't know beforehand whether there is a space available.

 If you are lucky to get a space in the car park, you hang onto it for the number of appointments you have to keep which can be hours apart. So sitting and waiting in air-conditioning and observing the sick and their carers is becoming another interest....The other fascinating but irritating aspect of Flinders Hospital is, that no-one seems to communicate with anyone, be they specialist or pharmacist or nurse. So a whole day was spent wasted just to see two specialists and a nurse....
Our prolonged winter is proving a challenge and while all the plants have responded very well to the wet and the cold , it means the weeding is getting far behind. I had another photo here of the Bluebells in the front garden but it has disappeared .....a pity the bluebells won't as they will be problematical the way they spread....

Well, here we are, I managed to insert the photo in the right place after all.....
The Tawney frogmouth is still sitting on his nest and his wife is sleeping in the pepper tree by the chook yard ... the Greenies are building a nest on the patio in the Glory vine right by our door....

Verses from the Book of Job

It suddenly occurred to me that I had not done a blog about my "Book of Job" verses.
I have been reading Rowena  Loverance's book on Christian Art. She writes eloquently about this subject and has wonderful illustrations to back up what she is writing about.
There is a wonderful photo of a linocut by the Australian artist Eric Thake so her choices of art for this book are very wide ranging in both times and artists.
So Rowena inspired me to make a book about the verses in the book of Job.

I have always admired the illuminated scripts of the monks who would have sat in cold monastic spaces, on hard wooden seats, concentrating on doing the lettering in gold and vibrant pigments,
creating books for the Church in the Middle ages.
So I have tried to make the first letter of the verse look more important than the rest of my writing.

The verses I chose are worded in beautiful old English and they are so poetic and inspiring that they are inclined to make one feel humbled.
Who indeed are we? who can command the eagle to fly or anchor leviathan, that great sea creature we all admire and stand in awe of....
the description of the horse in all its glorious strength and beauty and its courageous facing of the enemy in days when it was asked to carry its soldier into battles in olden days, is stirring and humbling....when you think what enormous effect the horse had still, in the First World War,

only just 100 years ago and how many died in the service of mankind. It makes you want to weep. We used horses in the 1960ies for mustering sheep and cattle on the steep hills of  Hughes Park and they gave of their very best carting us up and down incredibly steep slopes.
Racing over stony ground to head a freshly shorn mob of wethers, bucking and kicking their way to a fresh paddock. Or galloping madly after a steer unwilling to go through the gate into the yard. The horses were shod every six to eight weeks

by our local blacksmith,  a short but wiry man who lived in Auburn. To start with I used to lead our horses over to the homestead blacksmith shop with its coal fired forge and all the tools of the trade hung in neat rows. Or is that my imagination that it was neat and not hung with dust of ages and cobwebs thick in the corners...
later the boys would be roped in and lead their pony as well.....
The cover of the book is fairisle knitting with  a mix of fine yarns and a card this time as the carriage of my electronic machine was sick and ill and away in a place to be repaired.....

After SALA

 This is not going to be much of a blog as I could not seem to find the photos I wanted to add. Is it me or is it the laptop.....
It can be very frustrating to have ones' routine of setting these blogs in motion, altered to such an extend you can't find the photos easily,let alone choose the ones you want .
Enough already......
Our SALA month is now well and truly over and I find myself making small things at present.

 The above are two artist diaries with covers.
The one on the left is a fairisle design and knitted on my brother 860 knitting machine. It sold during SALA but the person has not yet picked it up.
The one on the right I finished this morning. It is knit-woven, the background yarn is a mix of fine cotton yarns and the weaving in yarn was fine ribbon.
I also did a batch of greeting cards yesterday, the painting was done in acrylic on a separate paper

 and then attached to the black card. I am quite pleased with them and my friends and family can look forward to getting them for birthdays or just as an "Hello".....
The two manikins each wear knit-woven kimonos with matching hats. I had hoped some fond grandmother or auntie might have bought these for a favored child but no one did and so they will stand in the studio to cheer me up on lackluster days.......

Koala portrait & $8.00 Eggs.....

This is a better portrait of the Koala which visited our garden last week. He came on Sunday and on Monday I found him in the Ash tree looking very comfortable. However, he disappeared since then and I have not seen him again.
What we did have on the patio this morning was a young hare, we have rabbits as well in the garden of course, but this one had longer legs and longer ears and loped away rather than hopped.

The vignerons hate the hares because they chew through the irrigation lines to get at the water.
So they shoot them but the kangaroos will also chew through the irrigation lines to get at the water, I don't know what happens to them though.
I can't get over how vibrant the autumn colours are this season. Usually we thought the colours were not much good in drought years but this has been an extremely dry summer and autumn so our theory doesn't hold ......

Above are the Golden rain trees with the pomegranate on the right and the Claret Ash behind them all.
On the left is our neatly stacked starter wood for the winter, our gardening friend is an artist as well as a gardener and very organized and neat in our somewhat dishevelled and normally wild garden. So it is a pleasure to see works of art like this instead of the woolly mess we may have left it in.

Well, now, I am pleased to say I happened upon some laying hens for sale yesterday on the way back from Aldinga. I went in to inquire and the man I spoke to was not very communicative but called his brother out to explain to me how old they were ( supposedly 2 years old but how can you tell with a bird? you can't look at their teeth like you would with a horse...). So I took his word for it and at $4 a hen who could argue? After some very strange antics to get them out of the trailer they were in, they were put into two bags, as I had nothing with me to transport them home in my car.

They look pretty miserable in the picture of course because they are moulting.  They did find the Chook Palace they were put into a bit posh after their farmyard shed and could not believe they were expected to sleep upstairs....
When I went to check on them last thing at night they were all sleeping on the ground floor...
Then, wonder of wonders, there was an egg in the actual laying box upstairs this morning and later I found one on the ground floor... so here they are, two eggs at $16 = $8 each, we will have them tonight and enjoy them.

On the right is my mothers sewing box she brought with her when we migrated from Holland in 1952. It had been sadly neglected by me and another kind friend who loves restoring old things, mended the lid and put in new hinges and a few screws and stripped it and varnished it.
So now it looks like new and I will use it again.
I remember my mother sitting at the kitchen table at Anlaby, darning  endless socks and mending shirts and sewing on buttons......
How wasteful we are now, toss out socks and other clothing when we think we are merely sick of them.....

New Wildlife in our Garden at Willunga

This morning, when I went to empty the teapot on a favorite plant by the patio, the Noisy Miners were more hysterical than usual up in the gum trees with the magpies equally  upset. When I went to investigate there in the fork of the red flowering blue gum was a Koala..... where did he come from I inquired, how had he arrived here?
He just looked down and wasn't telling.....
We are mostly surrounded by vineyards and the last Koala I saw in the wild was at Kuitpo, probably about ten km from here

 so it is a mystery as to how he came here. And I wonder will he stay , do we have the right gum leaves for him? I always thought they could only survive on Manna Gum leaves but perhaps he finds the gum blossom OK at the moment.
The plant on the right,an Agave of some sort, has taken about five years to get to this stage. Brian raised it from some seed we got from a plant in McLaren Vale near Hardies' winery . It has been the most difficult plant to photograph as I just could not get the whole of the flower stalk in, it is so tall.
It has lovely flowers on branches,  beautifully marked inside on
the flower walls.
Below is the photo of the flowers and perhaps if you click on the photo you can get a better view of it.
We have two more which are growing next to the Studio wall but on the south side and they are much smaller than this one is.

I guess it will die after it has finished flowering and I wonder if it will leave pups or only seeds.
The gum tree it is growing next to was sold to us as a Mountain ash but no way is this a Mountain ash tree. It is very annoying to buy a plant which turns out not to be the one labeled as such. We once bought Plane trees, thinking they were London planes but they turned out to be Oriental plane trees and did no good here at all.

Autumn has arrived and though we have hardly had any rain the bulbs have popped up anyway and it is always a delight to see the Nerines , which may look all dry and shriveled on the surface, suddenly shoot up stems and show their red/orange flowers in groups, giving colour to the otherwise brown and  desiccated garden.
They flower for quite a long time as well.

The paintbrush lilies are also on display now.
Of course they will send out their enormous leaves afterwards and each year I intend to dig them up and transplant them where the leaves will not be  in other plants way.
Bulbs are such a satisfying plant to have as they will die back and go through the hottest summer only to pop up again when the weather cools and the sun is no longer so severe. Great in our dry climate.

This year for some reason, the autumn colours are much deeper and the Virginia creeper is just gorgeous in all its red glory with the Golden Rain tree setting it off even more so when viewed through the morning light. My photo does not do it justice, perhaps I should have doctored it in Photoshop before posting it......
I am doing a photography course at the end of this month....hopefully I shall learn a lot from that..........

Grape Harvesting the Modern Way

The grape harvest in this area has been very early this year. They started harvesting white grapes mid February, which is at leas three to four weeks earlier than usual. Most of the harvesting is done during the night now because of the cooler conditions. The machinery thunders down the road, most of them lit up like Christmas trees with flashing lights in reds and white. the little tractors too, make a lot of noise as they trundle their empty bins behind them on metal wheels.

 My neighbour told me his harvest has been good despite the fact it has been such a dry season.

Now here is my new chook Mansion, it has sat in its' flatpack in the shed for the last couple of years and at last I had an enthusiastic friend who cheerfully offered to put it together for me and while I held the sides up, my friend put in bolts and nuts and screws and Bingo!! a new house for some lucky chooks to come and live here. Will I have to make curtains for the window? I'll wait and see how private the birds want to be...

 While cleaning up the old yard and little shed, I cut back a lot of creepers and this revealed the Morning Glory vine with its' stunning blue flowers and the pretty red berries of the Pepper tree. Mind you, the Glory vine would take over the world if you let it, a bit similar to the Banana passion fruit vine which is such a pest in our garden and I don't know how to get rid of that, its roots break easily so you can't trace it to its source.                                                        

The Batwing was knit woven with a two ply pure wool and a mohair fancy yarn with little shiny loops in various colours which unfortunately doesn't show up too well in the photos.
It was quite difficult to weave in as the mohair is inclined to hook onto the needle bars and I had to break the fibres or lift them off the bars nearly every row. Nevertheless it has turned out well and is a light weight garment with knit woven cuffs.
Click on the photos to get a closer look won't you....
My next project is..... I'm not sure....

Migration & The Watering hole of Galahs

 Here at last is another Artist Booklet,  this time it has turned out to be about Migration.
Not Migration of humans but of animals, birds and insects. The cover is knit-woven using a mixture of fine cotton threads in various colours for the back ground. The weaving-in yarn was an Annie Blatt yarn called" Seychelles "and it is composed of small oblongs of yarn on a thread, which does make them look like a string of islands, so it was a natural choice for this project.

 In my effort to be accurate in lining up the pages and covers before punching holes for the cord to go through and bind the lichen covered wooden twig from the Golden Raintree , so making all secure, I forgot to check the sequence of the pages themselves.So the first page is about the Sooty Shear water which raises its chick in a burrow on the foreshore. After the chick is considered mature the parents fly off traveling over 6400km to the north Pacific from New Zealand leaving the chick to find its own way.

 The second page is about the Humpback whale which roams the ocean over 6000 miles, the Grey Whale roams a massive 10-12000 miles.

The poor old wildebeest does a mere 800 km...
It faces enormous dangers though, having to cross crocodile infested rivers to get to better pastures...
Do remember to click on the photos for a closer look...

 The last page was meant to start the whole book off. It is about the amazing migration of the  Lepidoptera, Monarch Butterfly, from California and Mexico to north America . It does this over a span of four generations and it makes you wonder about the inbuilt sense of direction they must have. It must be a genetic blue print with which  they are born, as must the Sooty Shearwater have as well, to be able to travel on their own, to lands they have never seen...

 Although the booklets are fun to do, they do take a long while sometimes to come anywhere near to where I can see what they are wanting to be. I had these pages hanging around for quite a while, and the covers were done well before I could motivate myself to write on the pages and decide what stories to tell on them. Mind you, a hot summer does not encourage creativity in me sadly. I normally do the backing out of denim but I used some coarse cotton material I had been given which was inclined to unravel.....

What has charmed  us of late is the fact we seem to have acquired a mob of Galahs which I'm sure have brought all their aunties, uncles and cousins to use our pond as their watering hole...
They are fun to watch as they drink their fill bending over, tails in the air while their relatives hang about in the Holm Oak or suddenly they all take off in a screaming flurry of pink and grey and land in the gumtrees nearby wondering what the danger might have been....
Silly Galahs....

Rain on the Pond at last....

Some people would find my pleasure at seeing rain on our pond a bit weird...but this is January here on the Fleurieu and the height of summer.
And such a hot and dry summer we have never had as the records show.So when we had rain last Thursday night and early Friday morning, it was a real pleasure to record the rain falling on the pond surface.....we had 12ml of rain altogether and it meant we did not have to water the garden for a couple of days. Tomorrow we will start our watering routine again.

The other pleasure we have is seeing the pure white water lilies rising out of the murky water of the pond. As yet we have not been able to have the pond water clear, though at present I am working at it by using some bacterial stuff used to keep our septic tank healthy.... the goldfish seem to tolerate it as do the frogs, we have at least 4 frogs singing their froggy songs at night.
If I were a composer, their calls, all at different pitches and at intervals would make an interesting piece of music...

We seem to have acquired a small mob of Galahs.
They are an entertaining lot of creatures with a voice less strident than the Corella and an amusing way of going about their daily lives.
They are rather short legged and waddle along on the ground finding interesting plants or roots to eat, or they hang upside down from branches to let the rain wash their armpits, if that is what they are called in the bird world.

They have discovered the pond at last and after tentative explorations as to how to get to the water,( water lily leaves do not support their weight) they now realize they need to get on the lower edges of the slate to get a drink....
The crested pigeons are a bit put out now because they consider it "Their" watering hole and get a bit fussed sitting on their rock amidst a mob of pink and grey galahs .... do remember to click on the photos to get a closer view of these birds....

The bird on the left is a female Blackbird which flew into our window pane and stunned itself early the other morning. The wet patch infront of it is not blood but water which I managed to give it so it could recover.... it did and flew off when next I went to enquire how it was getting on...
one of my friends would not be amused about me saving a blackbird as they are not liked by everyone...I love their song and don't mind they toss the mulch about with gay abandon.

This birdbath is next to the pond and the Rosella and Greeny, which is a honey eater, were happy to share the water on a hot morning...
Tonight though, it was amusing to see the Galahs thinking this was another place to drink and the Magpies which also think this is their private bar, were very annoyed and were busy telling the Galahs to piss off and go elsewhere....
Such is life in a drought stricken garden.....