Well, Spring has begun here in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Lately during our Circle Time I have been reading aloud to the girls from this lovely book:  

Portrait of a Garden is New Zealand's answer to The Country Diary of and Edwardian Lady, albeit a more modern version.  Kerry Carman has produced some beautiful watercolour paintings & sketches of our native plants and flowers along with many of the common species.

Kerry suffered a spinal injury and spent months in hospital rehabilitating.  Consequently, she spent a lot of time watching the seasonal changes of the tree outside the hospital window.  This began her life-long appreciation for the natural world and inpsired Kerry's nature journalling.  The book Portrait of a Garden is a combination of the nature journals she kept between 1970 & 1974

Here is an excerpt from Kerry's entry for 13th September:

"The name 'Daffodil' comes from the French.  In early Greek it was "Asphodelos', in Latin 'Aspholdelus', and, to the French, it was 'Asphodile'; the first English name for it was 'Affodil'.  Pliny wrote that they grew on the banks of Acheron, where the blossoms delighted the spirits of the dead, who called them 'Asphodels'. " 

She goes on to tell the story of Narcissus, which I had never read, but apparently one of my daughters had read it somewhere before.  But is was nice to read, along with Kerry's lovely sketches of several Narcissus species. Here is another excerpt from the same entry:

"There are three flowers on the group of N. 'Dove Wings" - a very pretty cyclamineus type of palest cream.  I love these reflexed petal types - all the cyclamineus varieties have the endearing habit of turning back the petal surrounding the trumpet in the manner of a graceful dancer posing her arms;  or, in some cases, as in N. triandrus 'Angels Tears', like Piglet's ears streaming in the wind, from that much-loved book House at Pooh Corner by A.A.Milne."

Imagine our giggles when Piglet's ears were mentioned.  Off the girls were, down the street to see if they could find a narcissus whose petals resembled Piglet's ears!  They came back with some pictures of daffodils, we think most of them are the basic variety Ebony.  We're not positively sure of the variety, but we learned that the central part of the daffodil is called a "trumpet" (or corona) and that "cyclamineus" means that the petals are folded back like a cyclamen and we learned the story of Narcissus. 

Kerry has several sketches of the Magnolia or "Tulip tree" and it's flowers, which happen to be dropping all over our lawn from the neighbour's tree at the moment.

and just for a bit of fun, this is taken from the top of one our little Mexican Orange Blossoms - I would never have noticed the symmetry in those leaves, had one of the girls not taken the photo from directly above the plant.

One of the girls managed to take a beautiful close-up of this daisy (I can't find a name for this one)

For a child's view of our daffodil study, Emily would love for you to  visit her & Bethany's blog, Notebook for Girls for Emily's entry on the daffodil.

And for an Australian Country Diary, check out Jeanne's post at A Peaceful Day.

~~~~~