RegularRandom: 5 minutes on the verge

Tags

grasses, RegularRandom

My morning habit of a mini-walk at daybreak is easily transportable to the bush block where I spend weekends. After a respectable amount of rain (this was written in early December), the roadside grasses are flourishing and beckoning. Everything is still wet from dew and river-mist: my new sneaker-things are obviously unsuitable footwear, because soon squelching is added to bird song and the faint sound of running water. I walk the length of the reserve where we used to enjoy Saturday night wine, and find plenty to delight me. My flower camera lets me down a bit: I’ve scored a lot of blurs. But I’ve also made discoveries about the nature of grasses and the phases of their unfolding. All the roadside luxuriance boils down to six different species.

The silhouettes against the pinkening sky are dramatic and pleasing, and I have enough good enough grass shots for a post, despite their woggling habits.

This week DJ does miraculous things photographing a pink hydrangea in a way that makes me think “delicate”, not a word I’d usually apply to what I’ve always regarded as a cumbersome flower.

By the roadside

Tags

flowers, grasses, moss

 

Snowbush (Leucopogon melaleucoides)

Frosty wattle: Acacia pruinosa (?)

Garden escapees

 

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The river road 5

Tags

ferns, grasses, honeysuckle, Tuross River

This walking project was supposed to be a weekend adventure. Here am I, heading off just after wallaby time on a Wednesday morning. OK, I needed tomato paste and ground coriander from that general direction, but it would’ve been quicker not to walk as well.

But I walked. Today, along the course of the river, on a road with the hillside towering above me and dropping off beneath me, and the perfume of honeysuckle thick in the air. I caught a quick burst of the whipbird’s song, the mooing of cows, and then the approach of the school bus. Beneath the overhang of the cutting were wasp nests, and flourishing grasses, and almost vertically up, slim eucalypts. Below me the river wound, brown and sandy, but still moving in mini rapids in spots. Here were tree ferns, clinging to steepness and the russet unwhorling of their fronds. Kangaroo grass dropped its seeds and woggled in the occasional breeze.

My turn-back point today was marked by a signpost, a clump of letterboxes, a bracken-smothered track down to the water, and a patch of purple so vivid it resisted the camera.

The cutting

The river

Ferns

Honeysuckle

Turning point

Flowers and grass

?

?

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Casuarina

Casuarina

?

Kangaroo grass

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The river road 3

Tags

grasses, roadside flowers

The river road sequence has got me. I lie awake at night trying to visualise the next segment. When I set off about midday it’s quite warm and I’m thankful for intermittent shade and an occasional cool breeze. A creek winds along a hollow, green with willows and grass, towards the hills. A crane flies over, vouchsafing me a blurred image. White trunks reach into the sky which today is a washed out blue. The lagoon is home to a group of geese, the mown paddock to bales of hay, the dam to reflections of the wooded hills. An unfamiliar bird perches on a gate, unperturbed by my presence.

I become aware of smells: the pungency of cow manure and the passing of a fox, and the sweet smell of honeysuckle. I hear the chirping of birds and the thwirr of wingbeat; the honking of geese; the croaking of frogs; the tentative sound of summer’s first cicadas. The side of the road is rich with grasses, and I’m most charmed by what we used to call soldier boys, a more interesting name than Plantago lanceolata. Minute flowers I saw in ones and twos yesterday are suddenly lining the road in tiny forests. The lurid purple and pink of vipers bugloss neons through the bracken. Honeysuckle clambers just out of reach across a weedy ditch. Maidenhair fern and bracken are fresh green after recent rain. Shivery grass shakes in the slightest puff of wind and fresh gum tips are a gleaming crimson, orange and a powdery pink.

The road begins to wind uphill past a farm called Tally-ho, and looking back I can see the Great Divide beginning to emerge above the lower hills. I reach the sign-post pointing to Nerrigundah and see that my river road has become an official cycling trail. I turn back, leaving the next segment for another weekend.

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