Aussie colours

Day 29 – no russet red and gold leaves right now… but a myriad shades of green and pink….

As we enter autumn (fall) there are no carpets of brightly coloured leaves to crunch underfoot, but still plenty of colour, like these lilly pilly fruit, abundant against their shiny marble green foliage.

Lilly pilly fruit comes in all shades of pink

Many urban streets are planted with varieties of flowering gums. Some of these flower in autumn like the ones in our street.

This photo does not do justice to these pink flowers!

Frangipani blooms scatter across the footpaths as the weather turns cooler. I always gather a few recently fallen flowers on my walks. Their scent is intoxicating.

Some trees grow gum nuts that hang in ghostly clusters from their delicate branches.

I have been discovering more about how indigenous people in this state divided the year into six seasons according to changes in the weather and local plants and animals. We are currently right at the end of Bunuru season or the second summer. This is traditionally the hottest time of the year.

April will be the start of Djeran or autumn with cooling temperatures. This is the season for red flowers like the red flowering gums that line our street.

The colour that sums up Australia is probably red. Red dirt roads abounded when I first drove around Australia. There are still plenty of them in remote areas. The Nullarbor Plain that stretches east from Perth to Adelaide in South Australia is covered in red dust. I drove across it once with a friend before it was sealed. It’s 1,200 km or 780 miles of red dust. Red dust coated the inside of our car, got into our noses and ears and stained our clothes, even with the windows closed.

Much of the state of Western Australia is red. It’s full of iron ore and my research tells me rocks that contain iron will rust and it is the oxides produced in this process that turn the soil red.

SOL22