Day 51

After a relatively early Sunday morning breakfast, we got our act together and headed out for a walk around 10:30. It was a warm but overcast morning but at least it was dry. The forest is becoming awash with colour with various things bursting into flower.

It was a fabulous clear morning with clear visibility right out the horizon 40km or so away. You can see how lush everything is right now. Everything is drying out well with quite a few normally waterlogged areas completely dry.

For once there wasn’t too much moaning from the children and we made reasonable time on the walk. We did a bit of exploring around the point where one of the tracks in the forest narrows down to an animal track to try to find why the track ended at this point but didn’t find anything like a house. We did find this rather fantastic bracket fungus clinging onto a gorse bush. It was so dark I had to use the flash to get a decent picture.

The thistles are just about to come into flower and I always think the flower buds on these look great.

Everywhere you look now the foxgloves are in full flower with some of them shooting up nearly 3 metres high. They absolutely thrive anywhere a bit of light gets to the forest floor and are an amazing sight for a couple of weeks.

It is quite amazing how transient the various burst of colour are. You get things like Daisies and Dandelions for most of the year, you get bluebells for most of a month and the foxgloves are around for a month, yet you get things like the Devil’s Matchstick which only seem to last for a few days. Blink and you’ll miss them.