No Bloom Day

A lovely day here, but after the past month's ice and snow the garden looks terribly tatterdemalion and there is nothing in bloom. The snowdrops (I love their French name -- perce neige, pierce snow) haven't even dared to show their noses, the aconite patch is covered with solid ice, the helleborus niger is sulking, although I do see some little white eggs down low among its roots, and it is cheerless and discouraging out there.

I know that next month I will be able to be outside pruning the viburnums, cleaning up, and pulling the leaves of the white oak out of the borders and shredding them -- drat that tree, though, because it holds its leaves until long long after the fall cleanup is done and now I must clean up again.

So,since I have no blooms for Bloom Day, I decided to go to the beach instead. On the way to the beach we'll pass an old farm house with feral arum lilies -- in Australia, they are like daylilies in their habits. Once they escape domesticity, they arrange themselves gracefully by roadsides and dams and become enormous and ancient clumps. The winter beaches are in eastern Australia, and I no longer remember exactly where although I think that the one with the sky reflections is at Lorne, in Victoria. (And, once again I see that Blogspot has its own ideas about where my photos look best.)