Huge critters and soapy trees

Garden spiders are familiar in my tame Springfield garden. There are lots of them, busy webbing and catching tasty flying things. Granddaughter Kylie arms herself with her weapon of choice, a flyswatter, when she ventures out into the back garden for a morning raspberry or two, flapping her way through the myriad of webs. But, though there are lots of them, the spiders are pretty small. I was digging around in a rosebed, shamefully neglected, and looked up to see an Aussie version of garden spider no more than 6" from my nose. Yikes! It was a St Andrews Cross spider (Argiope keyserlingi), very common. But BIG by my standards, with her legs, about 3.5" across! They are harmless, pretty well decked out in fancy colors, and they make their webs with a distinctive zigzag pattern of multi-strand webbing, sometimes looking like a St Andrews Cross. I've heard that they do this so birds won't fly into the webs by mistake.

Moving on, we met another garden surprise, a looper caterpillar, one of the geometridae, or inch worms. He (or she, how can you tell with something that looks the same on both ends?) offered no resistance to capture, so he is now ensconced in our creature keeper. About 4 inches long, he will made a magnificent moth of some type, so we're anxious to see just what type he will be. We named him "Looper the Pooper", for the unbelievable output from what turned out to be the back end.

Not everything in the garden is huge, actually. The lizards are tiny, but they more than make up for their size by their sheer number. There are hundreds of them scurrying in and out of rocks and over walls. I haven't yet captured one with my camera, they are that fast. But every day I try. My most promising location is the mailbox, which is located in a brick pillar at the end of the drive. After I cleaned out the cicada husks and expired cockroaches, the little lizards decided this is a perfect place to hide out. The box is big enough that several of them have moved in, and when you open the box, you never know in which direction they will bolt. Surprise! Mail left in there too long will bear traces of their happy habitation. It's that poo thing again. Nothing like a couple of curious kids to have that topic introduced pretty regularly. By the way, did you know on a warm day when the cicadas are in full throat, the cicada wee falls like rain under the trees? See what I mean about the topic?

We had a fine rain the other day, and I saw my first soap tree in operation. One of my favorite garden perennials is saponaria officialis, soapwort, a lovely low growing shrub with pink blooms. The leaves can make a soapy concoction. Aha, but this is Oz, and everything is BIG, right? So it's a tree that makes soapsuds when it rains after a dry spell. No kidding, red ash, red almond, soap tree, properly Alphitonia excels, makes frothy suds! Jack was quite taken with the whole thing, as was I.

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