Spring is here

Even with our inner city apartment lifestyle - we're still very aware that Spring is upon us. Our St Germain garden club established a low growing 60 X 2 wide metre planted border along the north side of our block in May 2019 (I did the planting design). It has grown beautifully and brings a lot of joy to the residents and the public passing by - to say nothing of the bird and insect life feasting on its constant show of native flowers and seeds.

Our garden group has a few working bees throughout the year - and come the start of September we knew we needed to give everything a good trim to encourage Spring growth and keep flowers flourishing....

Many hands make light work especially when all the Anzac Whites need deadheading..

Meanwhile Rob and other members of the team took on the more overwhelming job of removing the vetch weed infestation from the native grass beds in our parkland (a never ending job).

With one very successful garden plot underway we're now embarking on another project at the side of our building, closer to the playground areas of our Hassett Park. For this job we've got help from other residents of C5 and the ACT Govt. under its Urban Parks and Places Volunteers program (UPP). First goal is to clear the existing bed of its poorly performing ivy and prepare it for its first load of soil and mulch (prior to planting out as a "woody meadow").

All us oldies were out doing the digging - all the younger residents of C5 were at the gym or drinking coffee!

Many hands make light work ........ It took an hour to dig out the ivy yesterday and another hour to turn over all the soil today!

We really do have some lovely neighbours at St Germain. Last Friday lovely Andrew and Di (and our friend David) took us on an outing to an area of Canberra we've never been to before - and which looks its best at this time of the year. The site of the old Sherwood Homestead, near Uriarra Creek (off Uriarra Road) is not all that easy to find and involves a bit of dirt track wrangling (thank you Andrew). Eliza and Henry Phillips settled in the area in the 1860s. Eliza came from Nottinghamshire in England and it is said that she and Henry planted acorns from Sherwood Forest in England when they settled here all those years ago. Those trees, and other exotics planted by the Phillips still stand today along with extensive fields of tulips and jonquils which have continued to bloom every spring for the past 160 years or so. There's no homestead now - all that was demolished in the 1970s when the property became part of the ACT Forest Park, but the daffodils and jonquils were blooming well this week when we visited, shaded by the still healthy forest of oaks, elms and cedar trees planted by the Phillips - an unlikely piece of England in the Australian bush.

Eliza and Henry and other family members are buried on the property, on a hill overlooking the site of the old homestead. It's marked with a plaque, but the fence around it and other grave markers have been lost over the years in bushfires.

There was about a kilometre of easy walking to "Sherwood Homestead" once we'd found our way in to an area we could park the car.

The daffodils looked quite different to contemporary varieties - very frilly!

A beautiful, but quite incongruous sight in the Australian bush.

A nice spot for a picnic with the neighbours!