Flowery Australian Flora

This past Sunday, due to loosening lock-down restrictions, I went over to some friends' to catch our church livestream and have lunch. As I was leaving my house, the surprisingly nice weather caught my eye and caused me to take a few photos of some of the plants in the front yard with rain from the night before still sparkling on them. The Sun was unexpectedly out—it's been rainy or overcast the past few days—and it lit up the raindrops in a really lovely manner.

I haven't been taking too many photos the past few months, so I felt like playing around a bit and experimenting with angles. Here's a bottle-brush still be-speckled with raindrops, with the blue sky in the background. A lot of stuff is blooming out-of-season this year, which is strange: apparently, in the first four months of the year, we've had more rain in Melbourne than in the entirety of 2019, and were even on track for having the wettest such time period ever. And we missed breaking the lowest recorded temperature on May 1st by a single degree (Celsius)! So it's not like it's been unseasonably warm or anything, plants are just blooming at strange times.

I don't know what kind of plant this is, I'm afraid, other than that it's different from the previous one. I was really feeling like pushing the limits of how close I could get a photo, and with the Sun shining brightly on the water droplets this came out pretty nicely I think.

And here's the culmination of my attempts to get up-close-and-personal with the plants. This is, yet again, a different plant from the first two, and I similarly don't know what it's called. (Edit: Whoops! I checked my front yard this morning and realized this is actually part of the same bottle-brush plant from the first photo.) I love the back-lighting of the fine hairs on the leaves, though!

I'm sure for my northern hemisphere readers this flowery foliage is nothing special as you head into summer, but I thought it looked nice, so have a helping of Australian flora! A hui hou!