Backyard Blooms

Our winter has been reluctant to depart.

September, the first month of spring, turned out to be the coldest in Perth since records started. 

In fact, the average daily minimum in September was lower that that of the three months of winter!

The abundance of rain, however, has led to not only the wildflowers having a boom year, but also the plants in our yards.

Our backyard is nothing to shout about, and I've to admit it needs quite a bit of work.

But everytime I look up from my keyboard and out the window, these yellow flowers of the broom just leap out at m.

The broom is a native plant and is nothing much to look at most of the year, but at the moment its display of these yellow flowers is quite spectacular.

To the right of the broom in the general backyard pic above is the nightshade, a plant related to potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines.

Whether ours is the "deadly" variety or not, I don't know

A lone hibiscus shows its face.

And our orange tree has buds, blossoms and tiny fruit forming all at the same time.

My favourite, though, is the nasturtium.

We had a big patch of them growing many years ago, and their seeds would appear to have blown into various parts of our yards, as we now have many patches of them growing.

Granddaughter A, now over nine years old, bemused by a nasturtium.

I love their leaves, too, as they hold these lovely beads of rain.  Both flowers and leaves are edible.

Our Indian hawthorn bush is also flowering like crazy.

And Grandma C's roses are starting to bloom.

A final word about wildflowers - when we were away a month or so ago on our wildflower trip, we did miss our favourites : the pink and white everlastings.

We only found a small patch in the little town of Three Springs, which, I'm fairly certain were not growing wild, but were sown by the town's gardeners.

The papery textured everlastings.

The yellow flowers in the background above, however, are not wildflowers.  They are the capeweed daisy from South Africa and are considered weeds. 

Currently these daisies are covering a lot of the street verges in Perth and on some front lawns.