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The jacarandas have bloomed in Sydney, a little later than usual. For a week or two, the city was covered with big lavender polka-dots, standing out like the aliens they are against the ambient green and orange. The trees themselves aren't interesting to photograph, but I had a pleasant half hour looking at lavender blossoms on someone's dark blue car. It yielded a monochrome effect, with reflected accents of both city and tree.
Not long after writing the last entry, on the 2003 Canberra firestorm, I happened on a very different fire landscape in the Kuring-Gai Chase National Park, just north of Sydney. A typical low-eucalypt woodland had undergone a quick, light fire. A flashfire. It burned nothing down, but consumed only color and texture.
Thus edited, trees wore the same black trunks as their shadows.
Some characteristic oddities of Aussie flora look even odder under this black-and-sepia filter. Spent Banksia cones, say.
Xanthorrhea bollards are black-trunked anyway, so the brown could pass for seasonal desiccation.
Only a flash of fungus on the trunk recalls the color of flames:
This was an amiable, healthful, invigorating fire. Not firestorm, but a fireshower. A firebreeze. A breath of fresh fire.
