Huge stick insects!

Posted on by Ian C.

It turns out that the stick insect I saw a few months ago is not so impressive after all! We saw a huge (4″ long”) stick insect this week – actually two, since there’s a smaller one on the back of the bigger (male/female pair presumably).
And then today, I saw another pair, one the screen of our pool / patio!

Now for anyone bothered by insects, here first is a picture of our screened pool and patio; the stick insect is just to the left of the corner pillar but you can’t see it in this picture (it’s not that big!):

Continue reading Huge stick insects!

Tropicanna Gold

Posted on by Ian C.

With the replanting after our pool build this year, we had a number of Ginger plants, nice with their variegated leaves. They seem to struggle with the summer sunshine, but we bought a few more anyway – and the new ones seemed to do much better with the heat.
One of the new plants is now flowering quite spectacularly and it’s clearly not a Ginger at all! It seems to be Tropicanna Gold, which would explain why it’s doing so much better than the “other” Ginger plants!

Snake in the grass

Posted on by Ian C.

Outside the front of our home this evening (Chloe likes to sit there when it’s cooler), I noticed a maybe two foot long snake in the grass! I got a little closer, and when I stood still for a while, the snake made it’s getaway across the path and into the bushes in our front garden (we’ll have to remember to be careful now when we trim them!):

(looks a lot like the picture of southern water snake here)