Slipping into spring

For me, August in the Old World (i.e., the Blue Mountains in New South Wales) meant gritting your teeth to get through several more weeks of harsh winter cold. Here in the new world of sub-tropical Brisbane, it means different, quite subtle changes marking the move into greater warmth and t-shirt-days-and-jumper-nights, before landing into the full humidity and heat and summer. 

This has been my third spring in Brissy, and between that and lockdowns galore, I've been able to observe and enjoy the big, tiny changes of the world around me. 

I've written separately about our bird observations - and separately again about our plover adventures, which were a big part of this year's spring season. Here are some of our other, easy-to-miss experiences about the slide into spring.

It's easy - and almost essential - to have a Poinciana tree in Brisbane. I call the one in the backyard our magic tree. There was one across the road where I grew up in Mauritius with great big shocks of  beautiful, brightest pink flowers. I always took it for granted as a pretty backdrop that would be there forever. And it was there, for much of my childhood, but it succumbed to a cyclone decades ago. Between its loss and living in the decidedly non-tropical environs of the Blue Mountains for many years, I will love and embrace Poinciana trees forever more. 

The Poinciana tree, in full green summer leaf-wear, and with bright, beautiful red flowers

Throughout winter, too slowly and subtly to notice, the tiny, oval leaves of the Poinciana trees change to bright sunlight yellow before dropping to the ground. It takes two ovals of sun to cover the fingernail of my little finger. So very tiny. Nearly always perfect. Sometimes when the wind blows, they shower down in swirls of yellow. When this happens, LittleOne and I run to stand beneath the magic tree so the - I call them sun drop - leaves can land on us and our outstretched palms. 

When the sundrop leaves begin to appear

Sometimes we'll take the fallen fingers of delicate Poinciana stems, with all the sundrop leaves still intact, and gather great handfuls of the tiny, yellow leaves in our palms. Then we throw them in the air like confetti while we call out 'happy birthday!' - to catch the wind and the light as they shower down around us. (The celebratory 'happy birthday' call is LittleOne's own special addition to the game.)

The Poinciana leaves becoming sundrop leaves during winter

We look for the small branches which hold these fingers of sundrop leaves. I call them wands - magic wands - and they fall in an infinite variety. We spend minutes at a time looking for the longest, the curliest, the greenest, the most zig-zaggy, the most magical wands. They fall in huge numbers along with their sundrop leaves. 

We also look for the seeds which fall out of the long, large seed pods. 

The Poinciana seeds

We gather them into careful higgledy-piggledy piles. Sometimes, they stay collected and we look for them as tiny landmarks whenever we go to visit the magic tree. Sometimes, in a fit of imp, LittleOne scatters them back across the garden. And then, after three-four short weeks of bare branches, the green returns to stretch tiny buds to the sky.

We have to be careful when we visit the magic tree as spring rolls in, because the warmer weather sees the return of all the bugs and little warm-weather creatures too. All the bitey, not-so-bitey, pesky and all the pretty ones. Almost to the very first day of spring, I saw - or rather, heard - the first lizard as it scurried through the borders of dried leaves to safety. Butterflies appear, as though by magic, fluttering on the breeze and across the green, as the sun warms up. 

An infinite number of tiny, shy bugs also appear to greet the Many Marvellous Mulberries when they appear on the mulberry tree. I got a little bit ...erm, let's say obsessive... with trying to not accidentally displace too many of these bugs when picking the mulberries. The ones with the small and big ants and funky flies were easy to spot and avoid. But I've learnt there are all sorts of tiny critters which don't appear until after the picked mulberries have been sitting in the bowl for a while. Tiny black beetle-type dudes that are one-eighth the size of a regular small ant, bright little green bugs, bugs which tunnel into the mulberries, ladybirds, little crawling creatures which look like a little piece of dead leaf no bigger than a third of my little fingernail... 

This last little guy was a new discovery for me. A little spider with a mulberry-shaped-and-coloured body. Excellent mulberry camouflage.

I refused to pick the mulberries and wash and drop the whole lot in water. No, no, no. I left the mulberries in a bowl, giving the bugs time to evacuate, then I would pick and tap the mulberries to make sure there were no visible crawlies, then drop them individually into a bowl of water, then eat. All the evacuated bugs got returned to the mulberry tree. This was how I realised that ladybirds seem to love mulberries. (Not that this newfound knowledge helped me much in trying to help my two recent pool rescue ladybirds.)

Bigger creatures liked the mulberries too. Some birds - especially it seemed, the blue-faced honeyeaters - seemed to visit the mulberry tree regularly. I'm not sure if this is what these birds are. They certainly have the same olive-green wings and the under-eye colours of the honeyeater birds. They fly in pairs mainly, and they are relentlessly bullied by the mynah birds. I wasn't able to include them in my bird blogpost because they don't get a lot of peace in our garden and never get to sit still for very long - so I've never gotten a photo. I invariably see them when they're having to make a run for it, hounded and tailed by the smaller mynahs. Meanwhile, at night, Bats have a surprising liking for the mulberries too. In the darkness, the shape of the tree bends and changes to the accompaniment of tiny rustles, and our quiet footsteps will trigger the sounds of branches springing free from a weight and the beating of wings through the night. 

Speaking of bats, but completely unrelated of course, there's nothing like crunching into ripe, juicy mulberries - where purpley juice stains the lips and flows down the chin - for making your LittleOne look like a toddler vampire in training! 

I really wanted to be ready for the mulberries this year. To tell myself I'd learnt from last year, and to be ready to pick as many as possible everyday, to eat and enjoy, and to not let the tree's bounty just fall to the ground. I failed of course. I tracked them diligently - from being tiny hard, hairy green caterpillars to growing unripe red ones, to the first ones ready to eat. And then all the mulberries in the world of the tree ripened at the same time. Too, too many. 

As far as the eye can see... mulberries galore!

We picked at least a bowlful a day. Left them on the kitchen counter to nibble; the final ones were mouldy by the next day. I had a go at a mulberry cake thing, which was ok, but I preferred them in smoothies. We ate a lot, but many more fell down than we ate. But c'est la mulberry vie. I'm sure there's an entire mini-ecosystem which exists around mulberry trees of which people are a non-essential bit, so I'm pretty sure the mulberry eco-system is happy to wave all its branches filled with large, saucer-sized leaves dismissively at me and say 'we'll be just fine'!

After the mulberries have had their run, come the return of the pretty Jacaranda flowers and their aggravatingly-pesky little seed pods. 

Jacaranda seed with a cooked grain of rice for scale

I'm connecting these tiny, feather-light seed pods and their needle-sharp points to the jacaranda mainly because they're the same shape as the grown-up jacaranda seed pods. These seed things could be connected to Poinciana trees, but until proven otherwise, my money's on the jacarandas. I have good reason to side-eye these little seed pods. In our first spring here in Brisbane, I noticed them vaguely - noticed them sticking to the soles of shoes, and appearing in greater quantities on the swept floor detritus. But then a couple landed on our Indi-girl's fur which I wasn't thrilled about. 

But my outright dislike was sparked by one of them somehow landing on my LittleOne's eyelashes! I made this discovery when we were inside the house. On eyelashes. After a nap. In the bed. No, it hadn't been there before the nap. The thought of the damage that the sharp spikey tip could do a baby's eye infuriated me. And I've not really let go of that dislike yet. Added to which, a few weeks ago, LittleOne was running in the garden, had a sprawl - as toddlers do - and the needle-sharp tip of one of these things bit and stuck into LittleOne's palm. Pretty flowers against blue skies, making pretty carpets on the ground, but still... Hmph. (As an aside, following on from a twitter conversation, I looked up Jacarandas, and was very surprised to learn that, in Brisbane, it's considered to be a weed! Because it drops its seedlings in such thick quantities that they choke out all the native species. 

That's a lot of seeds in every step! 

So, perhaps my crankiness towards these pesky seeds is rather justified after all!)

On a brighter note, the crimson roses also arrive at this time of year. They're really remarkable in the way they only appear once a year. 

When we first arrived in this house - unlike the white rose bush, which seems to burst into generously-scented bloom every few weeks or so despite being under attack from all sorts of crickets and harlequin bugs which regularly denude it of all its leaves, and also unlike the big, bold, strongly-scented yellow roses which have two or three flowery runs in summer - we had to wait nine months before meeting these crimson roses. Shy, strong branches, aloof and alluring flowers, and a subtle scent you can only smell by burying your nose into the blooms. I'm not a cut-the-roses-and-bring-them-inside-the-house type. I always feel like I'm shortening flowers' lives unnecessarily by cutting them. Plus, when it starts to rain - as we've had in this past week, I like seeing little bugs taking shelter between the petals. It nourishes my anthropomorphising tendencies 😁

And I suppose that's what these diary blogposts are for me - a kind of nourishment and remembering of the tiny, precious, beautiful details of the everyday world around us that all-too-quickly slip out of sight and out of mind. 

Du fond du coeur x