THIS ISSUE
You’re probably reading this in late spring/early summer but we put this issue together in late winter — albeit a pretty mild one, at least here in this part of the Hunter Valley. While some of the trees, like the glum-looking jacaranda, are completely bare and shivering, the grevilleas and banksias are bursting with flowers as well as with the preposterous colours of the darting lorikeets and rosellas that love these flowering natives. There’s something similar happening in the gumtrees as well, which twitch all day with skirmishing miners and lorikeets and the occasional pair of more dignified galahs. It’s one of the glories of the Australian bush that it’s in winter, when there are fewer pollinating insects around, that many eucalypts choose to put out some of their fancier stuff to entice…