Botanic Gardens serenity and cyclones

I took this photo a couple of days ago as we were walking in the gardens late in the afternoon. I love the peacefulness in this area. the post in the foreground is a surveyors' calibration post, one of seven in a line about a kilometre long. they were there long before the Gardens so the gardeners always have to keep a clear line of sight for the surveyors to come in a couple of times a year to calibrate their instruments. Bill is making use of the posts as well so he can use a GPS system to map out the garden beds and the irrigation lines and plants in them. This is all quite exciting, most botanic gardens in Australia only have paper records, and they can be surprisingly inaccurate at times. Of course, when the Gardens are so new it is much easier to make use of new technology.

This is a photo taken about two and a half years ago, when the vine arbor was first being planted. I need to keep taking these photos to map the growth which can be quite spectacular. The photo below was taken last week, though from a closer perspective. I need to print out an old photo, then try to stand in the same place to take the comparison photo - can't be done most of the time, the Gardens are developing into a series of 'rooms' , often hidden away.

I hope I will be able to take a photo this looking just the same at the end of this week, but we are bracing for a category four cyclone heading down the coast - we haven't had a cyclone of any sort cross the coast here for thirty years. This one, Hamish, is thankfully off the coast and should skirt us by, but you can never tell what they will do, and we are forecast to have winds gusting to 190 km/hour by tomorrow morning, with very heavy rain. We are already getting very heavy showers, I hope it eases off before Monday morning when we will have a very high king tide. We are in the area for gale force winds according to the weather bureau, but should miss the worst of the very destructive winds - I hope they are right. Bill has decided we need all the shutters over the windows and doors upstairs. He made these after the last cyclone in 1979, but we have never needed them since. they are all up now, so we are as ready as we can be. I went to the supermarket this morning just to get a few extra things - mainly batteries. The store was jammed with people panic buying, and the queues for the checkout were sooooooo long. Was quite entertaining though to look at what other people were buying while I was waiting. Out population has exploded in the last ten years and most of these people have never experienced a cyclone warning before.

Hopefully I shall be back to tell you what it was all like in a day or so.