tickled pink - a northern spring

While we here in the southern hemisphere slip slowly towards winter, our northern hemisphere friends are shaking off the covers of a chilly winter and embracing spring. It's certainly infectious reading all the blog posts and seeing all the lovely images of my favourite northerners as they get excited and outdoors. While nothing beats the beautiful weather we have nearly year round here in Australia, all the buzz about a changing season makes you wish for a more definite seasonal change here.

Here are a few of my favourite odes to Spring from the northern hemisphere:

{untitled}

{cherry blossoms by ~elena}
The lovely elena has a whole set of her beautiful spring images full of blossoms, tulips and scrumptious macarons! View them here

{Don't let go!}

{flowers and bees}

{untitled} I love the colour treatment given to this picture, it has a lovely vintage, romantic quality. 

Don't these all make you want to stand under some cherry blossom trees with petals raining down on you?

let's get outside - Terrain

I'm not sure why, but I've been a bit flat lately on the whole inspiration front. Usually I have a pile of places and things I want to explore through this blog, but it just has not been coming the past few days. Luckily, all that has just changed and I have found myself being taken on a tangent and discovering something lovely to share.
I was looking through the lovely Flickr gallery of Honey and Jam, again lusting over her lovely rough mug (see it here). I read through some of the comments and found that the mug was from Terrain. I went off to google and came across this lovely homewares shop. A few things caught my eye here, like the Cast Iron Apple Pot and of course the Boulder Mug that I arrived there for in the first place, but it was something else that stirred my excitment. Eager to find out more about Terrain, I clicked a link through to Terrain at Styers. This is a garden centre (in the USA) that has stirred a green thumb in my I didn't know I was in possession of!

Helped by these amazing images, I suddenly have a desire to transform my courtyard with aged timber planter boxes overflowing with colour.

I totally could see a fabulous aged urn overflowing with herbs of some sort like these above! I even have a bare patch of dirt near my front door that I could see a lovely big planter filling. I have lavender and rosemary bushes already there, but the other plants didn't make it through the drought conditions of the past years and so I'm left with a bare patch right at the entrance to our house. Thanks to terrain, I'm now inspired to fill it!
I can't really explain my sudden eagerness for gardening, and also don't think it will last that long due to it being Autumn here and probably not the best time to start out. Hopefully come spring, I can look back at these images from Terrain and get excited at the right time of year to get outside and start planting!