Flowers in January

I left Seattle on the summer solstice, right when the weather was starting to get nice, and plunged into winter here in the Southern Hemisphere. Now it's payback time. After waiting a year and a half for summer, it's feels great to have long, sort of warm days. Dunedin seldom gets really warm, but many days are sunny with high temperatures in the high 60s. It's a great climate for flowers, and they are blooming everywhere. Our new house has wonderful bushes and perennial flowers, so I just went and took pictures to cheer up you northern hemisphere people dwelling in cold and darkness. Our new house has a really nice indoor-outdoor flow through a big sliding glass door in the dining room.

Below is our cute mailbox, a typical mailbox design here. You can't see that the section under the roof, the triangular part, is open front and back, and that's where the newspaper gets delivered. The lower part has a slit in the front and opens on the back, and that's where the mail goes.

The next photo shows one of our two heat pumps which power the heating system and the hot water tank. There is no natural gas on the South Island, so people heat their houses with electricity, coal, propane, or kerosene. Electricity is obviously the cleanest and least smelly, and heat pumps get more heat from a unit of electricity than plug-in heaters do. Electricity is expensive here, about three times more per kilowatt hour than in Seattle, so winter heating bills are in the hundreds of dollars.

Hydrangeas are starting to bloom all over town. We have several that have buds, and one of them, a lacy-capped version, is just starting to bloom by our driveway.

Below are four more photos of flowers in our garden, some of which are unfamiliar to me.