Welcome back to our Spring Term 2017

We are starting our spring program. As well as our usual activities some members will be heading to Shene and others look forward to tours of TMAG.

At the end of the term we will be celebrating our Christmas Luncheon on Monday 27th November.

I often find it amusing that I can still be surprised by the variations in the weather and deceived by one warm day into thinking winter has finished. Saturday 2 September was a lovely warm and sunny day and we had morning tea sitting on a friend’s porch. The rest of the week brought me back to winter. As Charles Dickens said in Great Expectations: “spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade”.

Spring cleaning is best left until next year when it will again be considered. I have always avoided herculean efforts to clean the whole house in one burst.

Ah, but spring in the garden is a different matter! Daffodils, hyacinths, flowering rosemary and magnolias lift our spirits. Annuals planted adjoining the Clarence Council Chambers and the verges around the Hobart Roundabout give a lovely splash of colour. I appreciate them because my resident wallabies and rabbits just think I plant annuals as their spring greens.

We have been fortunate to be visited by over two dozen Black Mountain Yellow Tailed Cockatoos recently. We used to see them occasionally in twos or threes and only in the coldest winter weather. They are very partial to Banksia cones; they eat the seeds from the cones but also, for some reason, cut off the last couple of feet from the branches. Admittedly I intended to prune the Banksia this year but they have reduced an eight foot high shrub to a six foot straggly mess. The other tragedy is that they have eaten all the flower buds on the adjacent magnolia which previously bloomed every year since planted by my sister in 1977.

In addition the rosellas eat the buds on my flowering cherry. So we will have little in the way of spring blooms this year. It is just as well that I have a sense of humour.

We are lucky with our birds, not only these big cockatoos and rosellas, but also butcher birds, magpies, native hens, plovers, sulphur crested cockatoos, galahs and the charming native noisy miners. These are like a tribe of jealous fish wives constantly trying to ward off intruders and claim the garden for their own.

The harm they do to my plans for the garden is offset by the delight of their company.

Hoping you find much to enjoy in our program this term and, hopefully, some warm weather.

Jocelyn Head
President U3A Clarence