“Nanna, there are bees everywhere!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide.
She was right. As quickly as it came, the storm passed. The sun re-emerged, setting the wet, shattered gum leaves on fire with diamond light. They went outside to find a double rainbow arcing over the barn, and the sweet, petrichor smell of rain on baked earth. spring time in australia
Maggie’s granddaughter, Lila, arrived from Melbourne for the school holidays. To Lila, spring in the country was a chaotic, glorious explosion. The first afternoon, she ran inside with a shoe full of mud and a handful of “frogs”—actually pink and white patrols of clover flowers. “Nanna, there are bees everywhere
Maggie smiled, scratching Blue behind the ears. “So do I, love. So do I.” The sun re-emerged, setting the wet, shattered gum
“It smells like flowers and dirt and rain,” Lila said quietly, hugging her knees.
“It’s just spring having a tantrum,” she said. “It’ll be over in ten minutes.”
Spring in Australia doesn’t tiptoe in like an English visitor. It arrives like a surfer catching a break—all at once, bright and reckless. Within a week, the paddocks that had been brown and hard as biscuit were suddenly dotted with a thousand different greens. The ironbark trees, which had stood skeletal against the grey winter sky, began to fizz with new leaves. And the noise! The magpies were warbling their territorial, caroling songs at 4:30 in the morning, and the raucous screech of the sulphur-crested cockatoos meant they were stripping the almond tree in the back garden.