Winter draws to a close, as 'yellow month' begins

I started writing about March as 'yellow month' in 2006. Each year it happens - as February draws to a close and March begins, the sun shines a little more, the days get longer, and the town is awash with yellow wildflowers.

I should be used to this by now. But each spring, I am awed again by the wonderful variety in these flowers - weeds, technically - which grow each year, beginning in the winter rains. The warm yellow is cheering and fresh. I used to love seeing the primroses and daffodils of UK springtime; most of them were originally planted deliberately by other people, even if they then spread. But these weeds aren't even wanted. They're just a splash of beauty without an inherent 'value'. God is undoubtedly a master painter.

Here are a few photos I took yesterday as I walked to the Froutaria. These are probably my favourite of the wildflowers; we used to get them in profusion in the garden at our old house:


Here they are in context, with different yellow weeds growing on the other side of some waste ground nearby:


These are a subtler colour, and a more interesting shape. I've no idea what they are, but they're very pretty:


And then there are these, large daisy-like flowers which wouldn't usually appeal to me, but the colour is rich and bright:


This morning I walked towards town, to go to Tots. I passed this large patch of waste ground opposite Fanoroumani Church; the ground is covered with a mass of yellow flowers:


This is a closer view of a small patch of them:


Looking through my older photos, I discovered a picture I took of the same area (albeit from a different angle) almost exactly two years ago. In March 2008 we had just finished a very dry winter, with the reservoirs dangerously low. That same patch of wasteland looked like this:


There were some yellow flowers poking through, but nowhere near as many as there are this year after what's probably been the wettest winter since we arrived.