So over the weekend, we officially welcomed Winter. Lots of sub-zero temperatures and then we got to walk down to school at below zero this morning.

Unlike lots of people who live here, I actually love Canberra Winter, well at least the days it starts out blisteringly cold and turns into a beautifully sunny day, not so much the foggy and windy days.  I genuinely love the cold, have you seen all those photos of us running around Europe in the freezing cold?

Despite my love for Canberra Winters my favourite of our 4 seasons is Autumn. Canberra generally has amazing Autumn’s.  With all our cool nights and deciduous trees throughout the city it’s generally pretty spectacular. Our garden also puts on a lovely display.

This year the weather was just crazy.  Temperatures between 30 and 35 degrees celsius for much of March and then a very warm April.  I don’t think I even pulled the jumpers out until early May, pretty rare for around here.  Then we had Autumn for approximately 2 weeks and it started getting really cold and wet.  The poor trees were extremely confused, and had barely started changing leaf colour before having to drop all of them all in a hurry.  Then the mild temperatures meant all our spring jonquils and daffodils started flowering.

Despite all the crazy weather the garden was still very pretty (for at least a little while), here are some of my favourite images from this year’s Autumn in my garden………

The warm weather meant the dahlias were going strong well into late April!

The warm weather also meant plenty of bees, daisies, snap dragons and colour before the leaves started to change……

The first tree to put on the Autumn colour, are our Forest Pansies – always spectacular! It’s a shame the wind blows the leaves off so quickly, they are pretty for a week or so though……

The Forest Pansies are followed closely by the Dogwood’s and Chinese Pistachio, which always turn on a brilliant display of red colours………

We have a huge Manchurian Pear in our front yard, it produces beautiful blossoms in Spring and great colour in Autumn. It is also a favourite tree for the kids to play under!

The crowning glory of our garden’s Autumn display is our row of Japanese Maples.  This year they were thoroughly confused and were still pretty much green when every other leaf in the yard had dropped. We got there eventually though and had maybe 2 weeks of colour (in late May) before the leaves dropped in a hurry when it got wet and cold.

The same time the maples finally decided to get their act in gear a whole bunch of our Spring bulbs started flowering! One of our apple trees hadn’t even dropped most of its leaves and started blossoming.  One very confused garden. It will be interesting to see what Winter brings……..