A pink flower complete with ants

Bottlebrush seeds – a favourite from my home garden

A protea – the bees just love these!

Poker flowers from Western Australia

We have had a taste of spring of late and we enjoyed a whole weekend of sunshine on the first weekend in March. As we had been busy on the weekends doing house and garden stuff we took a day trip to the UCSC Arboretum for their annual hummingbird day. What a splendid day it was with the sun shining it’s warmth down on us while we wandered the gardens looking for the elusive hummingbird. I can understand the disappearance of the hummingbirds as the day got hotter I enjoyed a bit of shade myself as well.

So the kids ended up making their own hummingbirds and we used them as props in the photos 🙂 The highlight of the day was the collection of plants here – they are from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It was like walking around at home in Australia except there were many flowers that I had only seen in books and it was just wonderful to see them in a garden in California growing profusely. The bees just love the flowers too and we all want to keep the bees happy pollinating away! So many flowers that I had never seen before as they grow on the West coast of Australia. I am from the East coast and there were so many familiar flowers that I had grown up with, I loved being there and I am looking forward to going back again one day. There are more pictures of the photoshoot here…