Home At Last!

We arrived home in the early evening on Monday.  After we unloaded the car I put on a warm jacket and took a quick scout around outside where I was confronted with this....

...........yes - that's snow in our backyard!  SNOW!  Yuck!  I'm happy to report that it is gone now.  Poppa went out and moved some of it out to the sunnier part of the yard.  But, that day it was right there looking cold, so I tried to work up some enthusiasm when I found this little fellow...

....popping out in the flower bed at the side of the garage, and in the side yard I noticed...

...that the irises were also emerging into the sunlight.  These seemed like promising signs of spring being imminent.  And then I thought about spring in Florida which was already fully sprung.  The fruit trees were blooming...

....I'm not even sure what kind of fruit these trees will produce, but they looked beautiful!  I already showed you the orange blossoms which scented the air around the villa for days....

.........there were also these fabulous flowering trees........

.....there were a lot of these in the little city where we drove to the Post Office every week to mail our packages to our little boys......or those silly sock packages to the people back home.  Of course, there were the bougainvillea trees and bushes....

...these were absolutely gorgeous.  They were about ten feet high and just up the road from the villa.  Even the little hedge in front of the villa was bursting into bloom.

And, on one of our very last strolls around the neighbourhood, we saw these lovely trees.

We have been strolling past these little trees for years now, and didn't even know that they bloomed.  And, along that same route we noticed something else that made us smile.  For the past few years, when we have been visiting the villa, we have strolled the same route.  I think it has been five years now.  Every time we walked past the area in the picture above, we wondered why nobody replaced the little conical shaped trees - you can see on to the right of the flowering trees in that picture.  Well, imagine our surprise, when a couple of weeks after taking the picture above, we discovered this...

......see the conical shaped tree in the centre of the picture?  All those little trees that we thought were dead had come to life!  We were in Florida a couple of weeks longer and later than we had been previously, thus we had never seen these little trees come out in leaf!  Oh yes - I must tell you about a couple more things before I end this post.  Remember the photo of the trees that the landscape crews chop off every year?

Imagine our delight this year to see them sprouting branches.  We had wondered during all our previous visits just what these little trees would look like when they grew.  While they weren't in their full glory yet when we were leaving, they did give us a hint.

This is the one that we fondly call "ours" - it grows right by the garage at the villa - just look at the proliferation of little branches growing out of those chopped off branches.  Oh my!  I almost forgot to show you the........

...bottle brush tree.  This tree was about 12 feet tall and had a plethora of these unique flowers - and yes, they really do call it a bottle brush tree!  And then, there was the best flower of all.  Last year when the weather was so unusually chilly in Florida, the hibiscus bushes at the front of the villa had all but died.  We wondered if they would ever recover, even though the landscapers snipped them down quite dramatically.  They looked much better this year and were bushing out quite nicely into leafy branches.  We kept hoping they would have flowers before our company arrived in March, but it didn't happen.  However, just a couple of days before we were due to head north, we were ever so pleased to see this....

....little bloom peeking out from near the bottom of the bush.  Last, but not least, I found this amazing speciman growing along the edge of the sidewalk one day.....I guess reminding Poppa of some of his chores when he arrives home.

Yes, dandelions make an appearance everywhere, even in Florida!

So, perhaps now, you can understand why those little sprouts in our flower beds in Canada just didn't seem as exciting as they might have.  I have lots of other photos of plant life flourishing in Florida this year, but I'll save them for later.

Of special note!!!!  Sock Alert!!!!!  The sixth pair is finished and I will be posting the Sock Alert Blog later today!