Kangaeroo Corner

  • Purple Heys!

    Kangaeroo Corner is welcoming the slow onset of spring with a little shock of violet offering greetings and warmth in more ways than one. At the moment, our garden’s most prominent flowers are some hardenbergia creeping up a frame and showing off a bright shade of purple and specks of white. The tiny blossoms are adorable, but they’re also bringing me the wholehearted joy of being the first-ever flowers I have grown by myself from seed. I’m somewhat amazed by how much effect their appearance has had on me, which is perhaps a little over-exaggerated, but it is what I’m feeling anyway. It’s a mild sense of accomplishment and adds…

  • With 10 Thumbs, Odds Were Always For 1 Being At Least Malachite, If Not Green

    I’m notoriously clumsy, making even the simplest task a monumental one, but having 10 thumbs also increased the odds of at least one of them being green, if not a little shade of malachite. Nah…just kidding….I’m still bloody unco, and trying to prove I’ve got something of a green thumb only served to verify that fact. With the weather finally warming–and brightening–I could turn more attention to the garden, and instead of letting things lie, I want to get involved and get things growing faster than nature will allow. So I set my eyes on the kangaroo paw I’d grown from seed. These plants were important to me precisely because…

  • Garden of Weedin’

    Spring has sprung (for today) at least, and the garden at Kangaeroo Corner looks resplendent thanks to early morning weeding, a mow and planting plenty of new plants. Weather helped, too, with delightful sunshine and warmth as the temperature topped 20 for the first time this year. I had planned to transplant some plants bought over the winter next week, when we have a holiday, but circumstances conspired against me and I won’t be able to do it that day, so things turned out perfectly by forcing me outside from just after dawn. With last year’s lawn woes in mind, I have been letting the grass grow longer this year…

  • Gazing at Japanese Tit Birds

    Having put in the most demanding week of work I’ve done in years, then been woken early after a mostly sleepless night, I’ve kicked off this long-awaited weekend by sitting at the living room window and gazing for hours at Japanese tits. In a life increasingly marked by failure, it’s fair to say that one area in which I’ve excelled is in having a good eye for the birds. With a constant companion twittering away while nibbling on my ear, it’s hard to keep my mind of things like boobies and other types of tits, and before I come across like some fluffy-backed tit-babbler or horned screamer, I should note…

  • Fountain of Strewth Frozen Over!

    It’s a gloriously sunny morning today, but bloody freezing, as attested to by the Fountain of Strewth freezing over. Birds are coming to Kangaeroo Corner throughout the day every day at this time of year, largely to enjoy a drink or a bath from the Fountain of Strewth. I broke the ice so our avian mates would be able to imbibe if they wanted to, but couldn’t refill the bath as the hose has frozen over. My sports drink formed ice crystals during the morning ride. I’m not a great fan of the cold, but Tokyo has a pretty good winter if you have to have one. It’s generally sunny…

  • Devil Laughs

    Nobody else but me is gonna understand just how ironic this post is (provided it even makes it onto the site) as I type it out in an MS Word file rather than directly into the blog as I would usually do. With a couple of extra hours available to me this morning, I always had it in mind to write a post with the above title. What I hadn’t calculated was just how accurate that it would turn out to be. I was going to write about how 2024 has been nothing like how I had imagined it would unfold and that the devils laughs at those who make…

  • Kangaeroo Corner’s Critters!

    Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in Kangaeroo Corner. I’ll take the camera with me on a…

  • Procrastination Propagation

    Winter is probably the worst time of the year to try to grow plants from cuttings, except, like for me, you’re desperately trying to avoid doing something unpleasant and you’ve been handed unseasonably fine weather. So, instead of taking a trial test for a potential new job as I could have done sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours, I looked up how to propagate a grevillea. It seems the process is pretty easy (at least from the standpoint of the pros giving the advice online), but a lot of the available information was for the southern hemisphere and Australian conditions. And, then I found some…

  • Summertime Blues….er, Browns?

    Summer in Tokyo this year was just how I like it: boiling hot and dry, probably the driest I have experienced in 35 years of living in the Japanese capital. But while I loved the heat, my garden in Kangaeroo Corner had mixed feelings, especially the lawn that went from vibrant green to burned brown. Trees thrived! Most delightedly, the jacaranda we had written off as dead in the spring powered back into life and is now one of the tallest growths on the block. The “branch” silver wattle goes from strength to strength and the golden wattle beside it is flourishing. All the grevilleas, bottle brush and myrtles grew…