Today is the first day of Spring and it has turned out to be gloriously sunny. It was a big surprise to see such a quick change in the weather after the terrific thunderstorm and lashings of rain we had last night.
I woke to hear the dawn chorus from the many blackbirds, thrushes and tuis that visit our garden.
I managed to photograph a tui in our neighbour's pink blossom tree which leans over our fence. The blossom looks like bunches of dangling bells and is full of nectar which the tuis drink. Tuis are lovely birds with a little plume of white feathers at their throat. Their song is amazing to hear, it is very long and cheerful with a very wide range of notes.
I wandered around the garden with my camera and Otto followed as usual. I found many flowers just starting to open including a dainty forget-me-not, which I enlarged in the photo above, and discovered a tiny ant drinking nectar from one of the flowers.I noticed a few flowers on the yet-to-be-named blackberry/boysenberry bush. We didn't have any luck with the fruit on it last year. The fruit all dried up for some reason, despite the amount of rain we had. This season I need to get advice on how to look after them and identify what sort of berry they are.The pretty, mauve-flowered bush above fell over and split its trunk during the Winter storms. It managed to layer one branch, which survived, and this is flowering now. We had to remove all the rest of the dead branches. It used to be quite a large bush. The white arum lilies are flowering now and stand out brightly in the shade under the trees.
The Meyer lemons are ripening nicely. I picked one yesterday to use in a chicken and leek in white wine sauce recipe. The lemon was juicy and full of flavour and added just the right amount of zinginess to the dish.