A Tour of MIL's Garden: part two

Today we're staying inside and looking out. I thought I would show you the view from the kitchen window, where you would stand to do the dishes (when pressed), or to make coffee.
When I look out of one window, I am looking across the lawn which I showed you last time. The tree which I could not remember the name then of is a Silk Tree. It's also called a Silky Acacia, or Mimosa - how appropriate then that I love it! My old travelling blog - now defunct, with the posts imported into this blog - was called 'Mimosa Dreaming,' named for the little touch sensitive plants you see all over the side of Asian roadsides which I adore (even if they are essentially weeds).

Anyway, I digress. In this last week underneath both the silk tree and the philadelphus have appeared Autumn's little heralds: translucent crocus. I can see them from the window, poking their pink noses out of the soil and mulch and opening their faces up to the cooling sun.
I have fallen in love with crocus after seeing pictures of them in Wife, Mother, Gardener's Blog. Beautiful beautiful.

 Pull back now... Right outside the window are the stairs below the Japanese maple (the leaves not yet turned). A couple of bird feeders are here, attracting magpies, firetails, wrens, and C's 'favourite' pigeons (most print-friendly shout from C to the pigeons: 'get out of it, you great fat turds.' Poor pigeons. I think that's most unfair, even if they do bully out the tiny firetails.)

 By the step to the left: a little pot-pond. Lovely idea, pity about the mosquito wrigglers...

 And by the steps to the right, my most favourite plants in MIL's garden (although hard to pick favourites), the blissful calm white Japanese wind flowers. They sit in a dense violet carpet and are shaded by fuchsias.I have looked and looked, high and low in various nurseries and I can't find any white windflowers to buy for my own garden, only pink, so that is another autumn/winter job to add to the list: talk some of them from this garden to my own (they spread well, so I would not be denuding the population too severely!)

And then the fuchsias, beloved by the birds, which extend all along the back of the house and up the driveway. They are special, nostalgic plants for D, who remembers his mum showing him how to 'pop' the buds before they open. Now he cannot pass a fuchsia plant without popping a few flowers along the way. I think they look like ladies dancing, their pink skirts whirling out past their legs.






And last but not least, on the kitchen windowsill itself, a couple of sprigs of thyme and oregano that I accidentally weeded the other day, roots intact, which I plan to put into pots to see if they can be resurrected.