Personal Impact of Recent Heavy Rains

As the heavy rains continue to fall in Victoria they actually got so heavy where I live in the Melbourne area that my rain gutters could not keep up.  They over flowed and the cascading water was flowing down my living room window and seeping through the frame of the window.  My wife and I had to put a bucket and towel at the base of the window to drain the water into:

It was a bit annoying having to keep emptying the bucket, but it is a small price to pay to have all this much needed rain to fall.  I do have to say it is amazing to watch the transformation my yard and garden are going through because of all this rain.  This is what my back yard usually looks like in the summer:

Last summer it rain so little everything was brown and dead.  Now this is what my back yard looks like this summer:

My garden even has flowers blooming again because of the rain:

Last summer I had a small fern tree in my front garden dry up and die.  This is what the small fern tree looked like two winters ago:

This is what it looks like now:

I thought last summer when it dried up it was completely dead.  However, if you look closely in the above picture you can see the fern is coming back to life:

It is amazing how quickly the Australian environment can change once adequate amounts of water have been added to it.  For me at least it looks like even more rain is going to be on the way as more storm clouds gather over my house:

I just hope I don’t have to put out any more buckets today.