St Joseph Madison

Spring in Magaliesburg is fairly unique! For one thing – it doesn’t prize dates. That’s right – 1 September is official Springtime Day in South Africa, but the willows next to our stream have already had leaves for a fortnight and peach blossoms have come and gone! That doesn’t mean we didn’t have a hard winter – we did. The frost was heavy from May and a tardy black freeze in August messed up rather a number of plants that then had to be shorten right back or removed altogether. But on the sure side, the morning temperatures have been over zero for whole of August and the lawn that we dressed and watered as an experiment in the early week of August had to be trimmed by the 31st because the grass was so tall and deep. This morning I saw a dormouse pulling out grass and eating the roots that were watered yesterday. Precisely a few metres away, a duo of orioles was pecking at the grass. Hopefully they were finding insects and Magaliesburg horse riding not threatening the grass. I tried to tell myself they were nature’s way of scarifying the lawn for new development, but I don’t feel too certain. Since early August we have watered the gardens using stream water resonant in natural nutrients and this has paid off in a host of iris and magnolia buds just waiting to flare-up into bloom throughout the next week. That’s if the mousebirds and bulbuls don’t eat them all up first. The birds require the buds nutrients to get them into select rearing shape and regard our garden as a handy health bar! The mousebirds descended in a flock just a week ago and dismantled hundreds of succulent rock roses that had survived the iciness and were just going into flower. The debate now is whether or not to leave the stems to recover or just to draw out and fling the rest. Ah, the joys of Spring. After the first thrill of beholding new growth comes the sense that we are about to fight lush growth and the battle to keep our parkland-like Magaliesburg garden from turning into an African jungle! Bring it on!