The bare and the beautiful

 

There is no time of day to compare to the mornings in our garden. As you stand at the back door and look out, the low morning sun appears in the far right corner of the north-facing property and steadily lights up every plant as it rises.

However, as an early riser who's often out there before the sunbeams appear, the truly best time to view it all is that gentle brief time between dawn and the moment the sun starts casting shadows. 

That soft, low morning light allows the many different greens and the subtle greys to do their version of glowing, before old shiny guts appears over the fence and starts bleaching the light for the rest of the day.

So, early this morning was the ideal time to attempt my next video of the garden, and my focus this time was on the bare beauty of our two frangipani trees. They're all just branches right now. It'll be another couple of weeks, early October, before the leaves appear, followed by the fragrant flowers in November.

So for this next attempt at a low budget, iPhone video production, I've learned my lesson and will only post a link to the YouTube video, all 1 minute 19 seconds of it.

Here's where you click and watch the show: https://youtu.be/L0MDdvFZGAE

Meanwhile, here's a few photos of what to expect later this spring, plus as a special bonus for language lovers, one of my favourite pieces of wordy trivia.

The 'big' tree grown from a cutting is the classic Sydney frangipani, the white one with the yellow centre. I love it.

The smaller tree, also grown from a cutting supplied by a local art studio where Pam teaches, is a much more tropical looking, colourful piece of confectionery. I've called it Frangipani 'Serendipity' because it has been such a happy discovery.

And now for my favourite piece of English language trivia. 'Serendipity' is an invented word, and we can almost trace it back to a specific day and date: January 28, 1754, in a letter written by Horace Walpole to a friend. Pictured above is the page from The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of Serendipity.

The word Serendip is the ancient Persian word for the beautiful island we know of today as Sri Lanka, and as Walpole explains in his letter, in the fairy tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip' the heroes were always making discoveries by accident, of things they were not in quest of. Happy accidental discoveries, if you will. And to describe that fortunate phenomenon, he invented the word 'serendipity'. 

What all this has to do with gardening is precisely nothing, other than for the fact that whenever I go out into the garden I don't always think about gardening.

Take yesterday morning as an example. There I was pulling out all the weeds growing around the base of my little tropical frangipani, and instead of contemplating the exacting business of pulling out weeds, I was thinking of dictionaries, writers, Sri Lanka and invented words. 

And before I knew it the drudgery of weeding was over and it was time for a cup of tea.