Monday, 15 September: Blue Monday ecetera

A ground cover in the garden welcomes Monday with its little blue flowers. The air is heady with perfume - flowering trees and shrubs are everywhere. Here on the Highveld, it is dry, dry, dry. We are more or less entirely dependent on rain to fill the dams and provide water. Yet the dusty landscape has just come alive, more or less, without a drop of rain since April.

First the syringas blossom - the lilac blooms enchant and give the allergy-prone folk the most awful hayfever.

Marais Street a block away from Thatchwick and part of my dogwalk route. The bare jakarandas touch branches. In just a week or two this grey canopy of twigs will be purple-mauve blossoms.

Ever seen buttercups growing on a tree? The tippuana tipu at Uncle Tim's. All these trees are non-indigeneous, unfortunately.

Thank you to all the great bloggers who visited me in the last week. I am hopelessly behind in answering blog comments. Will get there! But now for the poems promised. For Willow and Lavinia who confessed their quirks, two fun poems by Ogden Nash.

The porcupine

Any hound a porcupine nudges

Can't be blamed for harbouring grudges

I know one hound that laughed all winter

At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.

The shark

How many scientists have written

The shark is as gentle as a kitten!

Yet I know about the shark:

His bite is worser than his bark.

For Pamela and her princely Edward, Robert Louis Stevenson on invisible friends:

The unseen playmate

When children are playing alone on the green

In comes the playmate that never was seen.

When children are happy and lonely and good,

The Friend of the children comes out of the woood.

Nobody heard him and nobody saw,

His is a picture you never could draw,

But he's sure to be present, abroad or at home,
When children are happy and playing alone.

He loves to be little, he hates to be big,

Tis he that inhabits the caves that you dig;

'Tis he when you play with your soldiers of tin

That sides with the Frenchmen and never can win.

Tis he, when at night you go off to your bed

Bids you do to your sleep and not trouble your head

For wherever they're lying in cupboard or shelf,

'Tis he will take care of your playthings himself!