Room with a view

Well the days have certainly got warmer very quickly. The rain has settled itself down to every few days instead of every few hours and the heat of the sun has dried up all the swamps overtaking the garden. The plants are enjoying the heat and the intermittent rain and even the vegetables have decided to grow. Hopefully it will be a better crop this year.

The Budleigh Salterton project is complete and our daily garden routine is very much one of maintainance - pulling weeds, pruning trees, mowing lawns. The black cockies are helping us out with pruning the bottlebrushes but they are a bit over enthusiastic and leave a pile of dead flowers on the lawn.

There was a little excitment when we noticed the huge pine tree along one of our fence lines looked decidedly 'leaning tower of Pisa' ish. It had already grown at a jaunty angle, preferring to live more next door than our place, but now it looked about to fall over (into the neighbour's garden, of course!) - the roots coming out of the ground was a dead give away. It was in one of the areas that had been in danger of becoming a lake from all the rain we've had. Anyway, the trusty tree feller fellas came along and now we have more firewood to chop up and more mulch to spread over the garden.

The best thing about the garden is that we are getting more and more time to just sit and enjoy it. Maru is the best spot for this and more often than not we wander down there for our afternoon tipple. From the comfort of the couch we can sit and watch the world go by. The birds don't know we're there and we get to enjoy their antics.

First there's the 5 o'clock swill, when the european finches fly down to the waterfall and use one of the basins as their bath. They grudgingly share it with the occasional fantail. The wattle

prefers to swoop in and out of the pond, several times, and then stand on the rocks to shake itself dry. The swifts do a fly over, dip and move on.

We were enjoying the show a couple of days ago when we looked over and saw an echidna walking through the garden that follows the driveway. It had a determined plod, plod, plod style as it walked up the garden. It tried to bury itself in the garden when we tried to get photos and then continued on its merry way when we retreated back to Maru. Not much later we saw it crossing the lawn and into another pocket of thick trees and shrubs. I hope it likes it here and decides to hang around, we certainly have enough ants to keep it well fed.

I'm sitting in Maru writing this, hoping to catch a glimpse of our frequent visitors or be surprised by something new. Salterton is staring at me, the Bali bells are going off and the sun is shining down on me, warming my bones....... now the frogs have started up too. Nothing to complain about here!