Last week we visited friends who live near Port Fairy, a couple of hundred kilometres west along the coast from Torquay.
Low sand dunes separate our friends' property from the beach. A famous landmark in the area is Tower Hill, an extinct volcano, which has a nature reserve within the caldera.
Seen here from a high point within the nature reserve, the caldera lake is in the middle distance and the flat coastline in the far distance. The Tower Hill Reserve had become badly degraded in the early part of the 20th century, but is now famous for the significant environmental restoration that has been achieved over the last 40 years. One of the interesting information resources in the restoration process was a large landscape painting from the 1850s that showed the flora and fauna present at that time.
Here three emus are grazing beside the visitor centre.
Four years ago we visited this reserve with our Canadian friends, Dick, (Laurie), Leonora, and Eleanor.
This time we saw a kangaroo grazing at the top of one of the hills.
Meanwhile back in the Torquay garden...
...this eucalyptus tree needed to be rather severely pruned because it was crowding a Cook Pine araucaria columnaris. The pine is in the same family as the Norfolk Island pine.
The Cook Pine is in the centre of this photo and some of the pruning is apparent on the eucalypt on the right.
When the arborist dropped some of the lopped branches on the driveway, I noticed that there were masses of flower buds that I had not seen in the high branches.
I could not resist gathering a few small branches because of the striking brick red of the flower caps that were about to fall off. They teamed beautifully with this vase by the Sydney ikebanist and potter, Margaret Hall.
Greetings from Christopher
27th April 2019
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