Jan. 15th wasn’t a rest day, yet it wasn’t rally a tourist day. We took advantage of the free tram zone in Melbourne and visited a mall with a unique store. They photograph irises, the ones in your eyes not the ones in your garden. You can have your pictures manipulated in some fascinating ways or you can just get a really good look at the components of your eye colour.
I was surprised that Anita and I have almost the same base colour of pale blue. I have knit Anita a hat in yarn that matches her eye colour. However my eyes differ in one significant way. I have a fair bit of brown scattered around my pupil. It really helps me understand why I have always had a difficult time declaring an eye colour.
We picked up our rental car, then started our drive out to Ferntree Gully at the base of the Dandenong Mountains. Before leaving the city, we stopping on Smith’s Street, which resided me a lot of Portland Oregon. Plenty of funky shops, rainbow crosswalks, weird parking requirements. We parked on the rooftop of Woolworths, which is a grocery store here. Nothing reminiscent of a five and dime.
Thursday, January 16, we headed out in search of Reynor’s Farm. It’s a 40 acre orchard that offers year round you pick tours. We loaded onto a trailer being pulled by a tractor, along with a mother from Malaysia and her three adult daughters. The girls came to Melbourne for the Australian Open tennis. The mother, like Anita and I, came for the all-you-can eat fruit.
It’s stone fruit season, so we visited rows of peaches, plums, pluots, apricots and nectarines.
When we were staving off a fruit coma, we headed off to the Dandenong Ranges Botanical Gardens. The highlight was most definitely a reproduction of a garden which won the Chelsea Garden Show in 2013. This version is bigger and is filling out naturally. The water feature is calming and the metal sculpture has its own webcam.
We spotted an echidna rooting for ants. We believe this should be the next star of a Disney movie. It’s an odd looking created with a rolling amble for a walk. It was quite shy, and would roll into a ball of bothered or distressed. At one point, it scratched its side with one back leg. The sound led us to believe the cost is not soft.
The gardens have extensive rhododendron beds. Most were planted in the 1990s and are well established. There is also a protea garden. The sign says these plants tolerate poor soil and a light frost.
Our next stop was a nearby playground. I don’t have any photos because there were so many children enjoying themselves. The merry go round was at ground level. I speculated there are fewer injuries as a result. Anita said it was at level to make it accessible. The playground has a few ground-level trampolines, a pair of zip lines ideal for racing, a handful of slides, swings and rope climbing structures, some cement reptiles to climb on, and a pair of houses in the toddler area. The most unusual installation to this wet-coast Canadian, was a water feature. The water turned on when you pressed a button. It runs into a wooden trough, about four inches in diameter, and the child can direct the water to a table on their left or their right. It’s a really simple installation, and I can see it being really popular.
Next, we went on some short forest walks. The first was only 10 minutes, so we found a longer one to some falls. The falls were hard to see. Trees had fallen and the creek bed was covered in debris. The visible parts were really nice.
Somehow, we fit in a visit to a yarn store. Her supply of local yarns was a bit light at the moment. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Mountain Ash Yarnery.
Before I sign off for the day, I’d like to mention the scents. Australia has many eucalyptus trees, so the air is often fragrant. When it rains, the scent intensifies and is spicier. It’s a feast for the senses.
Juliette Knits 