Winter in Brisbane

Hello,

No cards this time, I wanted to share some photos.

Looking over all the blogs out there, I was pondering the different look of the seasons around the world.  Here in Brisbane, we don't get much of a winter.  Brisbane winters are very mild, with only a few cold weeks. This means that we don't get that beautiful autumn blush that colder climates get leading into the cold, leafless winters.  We get a reduction in rain, and not so much HEAT.  Winter is our dry season, a relief for me after the muggy, humid summer.  So everything goes a bit brown/dull green and dusty with lack of water.

Anyway, for the last week or so, in our late winter with spring peeking in every now and then, I have noticed that the jacarandas have turned beautiful golden colours.  At the end of winter the jacaranda trees lose all their leaves in preparation for flowering in mid-Spring. They used to say (and probably still do), if you haven't started studying for end-of-year exams by the time the jacarandas bloom, it's too late. By the way, I proved that saying wrong plenty of times, LOL.

I love jacarandas in bloom, and I haven't ever really taken the time to appreciate jacarandas at this time of year.  Well, I'm appreciating them at the moment.  Here are a few photos. I haven't tweaked them in any editing programme other than to crop a couple of photos, so what you see is what my camera saw, without filters (in my amateur hands).

That's the Brisbane Winter sky peeking through behind my jacaranda tree.

Close up to show the beautiful red of the "twigs" (can't think of the correct name at present, they're not branches really).

I love these colours.

Can you see all those bits of yellow peeking through this scene? They're all jacarandas.  This is what I see from my front veranda. Ooh, I can't wait to see this scene in a month or two!  It's a bit smokey today, grass fires and burn offs are causing dull conditions.

For those of you who don't know, jacarandas in bloom look like this:

Their true beauty is when they are planted near other jacarandas, and Brisbane in mid-spring is a mass of jacaranda blue (which I would call purple).  Jacaranda season makes me smile.
A couple more photos from my winter garden. Autumn colours in winter:

And my Spoodle, Coco, in desperate shaggy need of a haircut:

I hope you enjoyed my show and tell.

Michelle
xxx