Spring Time in the Bickley Orchards

Well, as happens every year, it is spring time in the orchards east of Kalamunda out around Bickley. On Sunday afternoon I took a drive around to see what I could find to point my camera at. Following are a few of the shots I took.

The first is of ‘cherry’ blossoms—but I think they are actually apple blossoms. If you know what they are then feel free to share. My knowledge of orchard blossoms is sadly lacking (i.e., basically nil).

And for anyone who would like to see what those blossoms look like closer up ….

The following shot looked a lot more interesting when I was taking it than it turned out in the photograph. Although it looks like a black and white picture it is actually a full colour photograph. Notice the bit of (overexposed) blue sky across the top and the hints of green in amongst the white blooms?

Standing there taking this picture it looked great but when you see it as a 650 pixel wide picture it looks way too busy and you can’t really pick out any distinct individual blooms.

The problem with ‘spring’ in Western Australia is that it only lasts about four weeks at best so that only gives me a few weekends to get out and take ‘spring’ pictures. Basically we go from Winter to Summer with this very short little mild spring period in between. We don’t get the long spring season of two months that Europe typically gets.

When I was a lad and we lived up in the semi-arid central wheat-belt of Western Australia my dad used to half-jokingly say as spring turned up “Are you ready for two weeks of spring? Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.” Or words very similar to that. I think up there spring was about two weeks. Four hundred kilometres further south down here around Perth I think we manage about four weeks.