Spring arrived all of a sudden after a long, cold, wet winter in the Perth Hills, WA!
Faces called flowers started to float out of the ground (to misquote E. E. Cummings) and Balligar (our property) was floated in native, wild ones.

This is one of the first of the flowers to arrive in our garden this Spring. I captured it in pen and watercolour:

Grevillea Olivacea – Helen Lock

Olive Grevillea is a handsome shrub endemic to the south west of Western Australia.
Its small leaves resemble those of the European Olive hence its name.  The flowers range in colour from creamy yellow, through apricot to red.  This shrub is featured on the Grow Me Instead website which promotes alternatives to invasive plants.

I love the spidery look of Grevillea flowers, even though I’m arachnaphobic – and with good reason according to Bill Bryson in ‘A Sunburned Country’:

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia’s spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

🙂
Helen

PS Grandson arrived safely with Spring 🙂 🙂 🙂