a walk in the park

If life is like a box of chocolates, I feel like I left my box out in the road and a ten-ton truck drove right over it. I managed to make the effort on Wednesday to spend an hour wandering round Arderne Gardens in Claremont, on my own.  When Alex was little, we often used to go there to feed the ducks and roll around on the grass. She used to call it the Wedding Park, because on Saturday afternoons enormous parties of beautiful brides and grooms and their extended families would disembark from fleets of beribboned limousines for photo time.

This is the first tree you pass on entering the gardens from the main road. Many pixies live in and around it but they are shy, I didn’t see a single one. Or maybe Wednesdays are their shopping days and they were all down the road at Pick n Pay, stocking up on peanut butter and marie biscuits.

I am very ignorant about trees, and as I walked around I jotted down the names of some of them – water pear, blueberry ash, copper beech, Cedar of Lebanon, forest saffron, hoop pine, bunya-bunya, jacaranda, and – my personal favourite – the “Bushman’s poison tree”. I’d like to think I’ll be able to identify them in the future, but it’s unlikely (although you never know when you might need a bit of fresh poison so I’ve made a mental note of exactly where that one is growing).

The littlest pond has all dried up (please please let it rain soon…..) although the elephant ear plants were still managing to grow round the sides. Heart leaves – what’s not to love?