Spring

They say Victoria is the garden state and that Melbourne is the garden city. Well, at the moment, I'm inclined to agree with them. It's a beautiful spring day here in Melbourne. There's not a cloud in sight, and just the gentlest of breezes coming from the sea a mere 5 minute walk away and the sun is warm on your skin. I've just been enjoying the weather resting in the shade of the palm trees in the park outside TAB's flat, enjoying the smell of newly mown grass and the flowering trees that are just coming into bloom. Port Melbourne is a lovely little area, it's full of little old single story houses (as most of Oz is, I'll grant you) with the occasional 2 story house thrown in. They are mainly wooden slatted buildings and each as different as the next apart from one feature, they almost all have wrought iron decorations round their porches and balconies. They don't have much in the way of gardens in this part of the city and the houses can be quite close to the next but one thing I've noticed, especially as spring has arrived, is that they all do their very best to fill what little space they have before the pavement with greenery. Lemon trees, orange trees, magnolias, all sorts of fragrant flowering trees, bushes and plants explode from every porch. Walking home from the tram from work in the evening is a stroll to be enjoyed, I find myself sauntering along, watching the sun set over the trees that, if they couldn't make the road wide enough to put a strip down the middle, are planted down the pavements, breathing in the sea air and the heavy frangrances from the porches that I pass and being deafened by the huge amounts of birds roosting in the trees, and I believe I mentioned that there are a LOT of trees! I'm not one for cities, I find myself getting claustrophobic if I don't get the chance to escape to the country fairly regularly. I moved to an area out of Leeds that put me at an extreme disadvantage if i wanted to get anywhere simply for the pleasure of a garden and the fact that I could see fields from my bedroom window but here, here is different. You couldn't escape the greenery in Melbourne even if you wanted to. Albert park is a 20 minute walk away with it's lake and huge stretches of lawns (and, of course, GP...) and it's huge, you can almost get out of sight of the tall buildings of the city centre and St Kilda Road in the middle of it, spying the tops just over the tops of the trees. Melbourne is a city I could find myself falling in love with and am finding myself very loathe to leave. But then again, maybe it's just the joys of spring in me and once I move on I'll feel differently. Only time will tell, I suppose.