Good mornings

All the gardening gurus in the Southern Hemisphere will tell you what a lovely thing it is to have a "north-facing" garden. And they're right. Yes, you get more sunshine if your garden faces the sun, and for lots of plants, especially flowering plants and quick-growing vegies, a sunny garden is a little patch of heaven.

Our garden doesn't quite manage heavenly, pure-north-facing perfection, but it does face north-east. It leans towards the morning sun and tends to shy away from the afternoon sun. I'm just the same, myself. Love the mornings, hate the afternoon heat, too. It's nice to be simpatico with your own patch of ground ...

And so as I looked out the back door this morning, the first thing to catch my eye was the way the morning sun was lighting up the first of this year's Iceland poppies.

It really is the prettiest time of day to be here, and as the early mornings are almost always a time when it's just Pammy and me here in our garden, we are constantly delighted and dazzled by sparkly little details backlit by morning sun.

Everything here looks good in the morning sun. Even the washing drying on the clothesline – well, if it's a few tea towels and some of Pammy's colourful cotton blouses – looks like a painting.

Every year I plant poppies for Pammy, and when there are several up in bloom all at the same time, she brings them inside and pops them in a vase. Nice tradition, bringing the morning sunshine inside ...

A pinky-green morning

Our garden faces the morning sun, and this being a day when rain is around, the sunlight surged through the clouds in an ever-changing glow of pink. Pammy called out "come and look at this" and over the next few minutes — it's a brief show — the sky turned from a murky mushroom pink then swapped from murky to musky, then someone in the heavens switched on all the power at once as the sun crested the horizon, and for those last few minutes of the morning show we were on Mars. 

Nice start to the day. Do your work, rain gods! 

One thing our wonderful digital cameras cannot do is capture the subtleties of morning light. They turn the dusky pink sky almost white as they over-compensate to light up the deep, deep greens at ground level. The only evidence of our rosy awakening in this morning panorama is that our path and mulch look pinker than usual. As they say "you had to be there".

And yet as we looked out at our lush late summer garden, Pammy and I discussed how many different shades, tones and intensities of green that we could see as well. Tens, hundreds ... an infinite number? Unknowable, but a pinky-green morning is a good way to start the day.