Hot and purple

I've been overcome by the heat. It's been like late summer here rather than late spring with 30 degree plus days even in cool Ballarat, no rain in a month when we expect rain, and the plants in the garden are racing to keep up.

The garden has been briefly full of beauties like these, old-fashioned  iris that I've acquired from old gardens and roadsides.

They rushed into bloom and plants that usually flower all through November had finished in two weeks. I've saved a few pictures of them.

The hot weather has made the lavender bushes happy. I gathered five baskets of lavender from the garden, the English lavender that preserves against moth and decay.

It dried in a couple of hot days and I made simple lavender bags to sweeten the shelf of winter flannel sheets

and to protect the newly -washed, sun-dried winter woollies folded away in the cupboard waiting the cold on a day that feels as if cold will never come again.