Trees can be very tall.
They can touch the sky.
The trunks and roots are their legs.
The branches are their hands.
The leaves are their eyes and ears.

This tree produces the following seed.

The seeds look like a gasing (means spinning tops in Malay)

there are also other types of seeds.

The trees can be  great artists.  They always hide their artistic lines around them.  If you look around carefully, you will be able to discover them.

Although some of the trees have come to the end of their lives.  The shape of their trunk will still show their artistic beauty for decades, hundreds of years or even thousands of years.

There is a hole in this trunk.  I wish there was a rabbit like the one mentioned in a fairy tale staying inside and say hello to me.  But I wouldn’t know how I am going to react if this happened.

They might also turn themselves into a good place for mosses to grow onto.

Big and small branches on the trees look like roads and streets.

If you have studied Biology, you would know that there is a transport system in plants.  The water is transported from root to leaves by xylem, and the organic nutrients generated by photosynthesis (particularly sucrose is transported to all parts of the plant where needed by phloem.

The transport system in a tree must be very complicated and there are many junctions.  But I don’t think a traffic light nor a flyover bridge is needed for them to have a proper transport system.

Headless tree. :O

This tree needs skin care.

A tree couple.  They may be sharing the same roots.

This tree has soft branches.  Its hands look like girls’ soft hands and fingers, dancing gently in the sky.

Some of the trees have simple branches, some have complicated branches.

This tree was bleeding.  The latex in light brown is its blood.  The latex was dried in the air, but I don’t think the tree will stopped bleeding.  I did not touch it, it might be poisonous or cause skin problems.

If I am not mistaken, this is the maple tree.  Some of the leaves have dried and turned brown.  In autumn, it will turn into the colour of falls.  The whole tree will have ‘red hair’.

If you have discovered more interesting things about trees, don’t forget to tell me.  Hope you enjoyed this post.  :)

There are a lot of plants in Piney Lakes Reserve, but I do not know most of their names.  So let me quietly show you the pictures of them.  And I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the nature there.

We close our eyes when we listen to music, now I will shut my mouth (stop typing) when looking at the following pictures.  And you can imagine the quietness of the reserve but able to feel the activeness of the plants.  Then you would be able to listen to how the mother nature greet you.

This is the Banksia.  SShhh… …

When the little dried branches dropped onto the ground, the trees were actually creating some patterns on the ground.  It can be artistic.  I believe there must be secrets that the trees wanted to tell us.  But who can decode it?

Sometimes the wind helps the tree to produce their artwork.  After hours or days, the gardener come and erase their artwork and give them a new piece of empty drawing paper.

The tree language.

SiewPeng and the trees.

Coming up, I will show you the photos of trees in Piney Lakes Reserve.

Continued from our unforgettable experience of finding this Piney Lake, finally we found it.

The size of the lake is not as big as I expected.

The scenery around the lake was also not as beautiful as I expected (if compared to many places I have visited such as Kek Lok Tong).

Do you think this lake is beautiful?

But there are more birds than I expected.

Most of them look like ducks.

They seemed to be swimming happily in the “small” lake.  I can see that the main objectives in their lives is to look for food and look for a partner.  Feeding is not allowed in this park though.

They walked nearer to us if we carry something in our hand (they thought we would give them food, but we did not).  They ran away when I chased then.  They ran slowly in a cute way.  It was fun playing with them.

This group of birds have a same characteristic as human being - “find a cooler place to sit”.

I remember a Teochew song (one of the Chinese dialects), “DiGoLiangDiGoZhor“.  Translated directly it means “where is cooler where we sit“.  In the other part of the lyric, it mentioned that “where got money where we go“.  :O

Should I call it a pond or a lake?

How about if a human wants to swim here?  :P

This is a little bridge to get across a stream.

The stream is connected to this mini man-made waterfall.

The trees looked like having a meeting in this round shape area.

Conclusion, Piney Lakes Reserve might not be the most beautiful place to visit, but it has its own uniqueness which cannot be found in the other places in this world.  :)

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Anyway, every place that I have visited gave me a feeling.

We visited a place because someone introduced it to us otherwise we might not have even heard about that place.  No matter who introduced it, whether he, she or they 1.  guide us personally or 2.  wrote about the place and we read about it and visited the place on our own, there must be some interesting attractions about the place otherwise they would not even mention about it.  Sometimes the map is a good introduction method that tells me to visit a place.

In bookshops, it is common to find books such as 1001 great places that MUST be visited, 500 most uniques places in the world etc..  When I came across these books, most probably I would flip to the pages of the places that I have visited.  Then I will start to compare.  Yes, it is the time to compare my personal feeling and experience about the places with the author’s point of view.  Sometimes I agree, but sometimes not.  It does not means that it might not a good place to visit, but there are 3 factors that create the bias.

In Chinese, they are 1. TianShi (time),  2. DiLi (location), 3.  RenHe (people).  If there is a good combination of these 3 factors, everything would be perfect.  But most of the times, because of these factors, it is a bias to make a conclusion about a place.

Sometimes we can see that the introducer has had a good memory at the place that he / she introduces.  One might said that it is a romantic place if one has been there with his / her lover.  Next time, if I tell you about the unattractive park next to my house is a beautiful place to visit, you would understand what I mean.  May be I should not use the word “bias”, but it is just the personal feeling about a place.

If you ask me if I would like to come to this Piney Lakes Reserve again, I will say YES, because I have not seen how it looks like in other season - spring,  autumn and winter - (the factor of time), it might looks nicer in one of the seasons.  I also want to bring my brother here to see the grassland (with green grass and blue sky) that looks similar to a Windows XP wallpaper - (the factor of people).  Then I will compare my experience of the first visit and recall the previous memories.  I think next times I come here I will still remember a song - fireflies.

Thanks to SiewPeng’s sister who brought us here.  She came here before and I believe she like this place.  She must have been introduced by someone else to this place, and now I am introducing this Piney Lakes Reserve to you.

Next, I will show you a big collection of natural things that I found in this reserve.

ps: I also learned another thing - Do not judge a place by its name.

From the road directory, we found that the Piney Lakes Reserve is at the junction of Murdoch Drive and Leach Highway.  We parked the car at the car park near Leach Highway entrance of the Piney Lakes Reserve.  If you are familiar with this place, you will know what happened as we were looking for the lake.

Well, it was a hot Tuesday afternoon.  The first impression was good because there are solar power street lights.

We were walking in slightly deeper to the park and found another big piece of solar cell.  Thumb up because it is using clean energy which is environmentally friendly.

We saw the signboard showing the dog restrictions rules for Piney Lakes Reserve.

We were in the woodland and we reached a junction.  The following signboard stopped us to use this path.  If there were snakes, do you dare to walk into the park?

As you can see, the signboard is labeled with City of Melville.  It is a Local Government Area in the southern suburbs of Perth.  Piney Lakes Reserve is surrounded by the 3 suburbs under City of Melville (Winthrop, Murdoch and Bateman). …

… I have learned more about suburbs in Perth although sometimes it might be confusing.  Without doing some reading from wikipedia, I thought I had went out of Perth City when I saw “City of -something-” in Perth.  As I know, there are many “cities” in Perth, there is a local government / authority for each “city”, and each city has many suburbs.  Correct me if I am wrong.

We continued to walk into the wood land.

We found some protected plants along the way.

We found many things, but we did not find the lake.  A question started to come into my mind, “Why is there no lake in a place called “Piney Lakes Reserve?”.

I play a joke with SiewPeng’s sister by asking her this question bacause she brought us there and was our tour guide.  :P  She did not know how to answer my questions.  Hope she did not take my words seriously.  Hehe…

What we had found out is that the lake is actually located about 800 meters from where we parked our car.  There is another entrance for car park at Piney Lakes Reserve at Murdoch Drive which is just next to the lake and it would save us a lot of energy walking under the hot sun for almost 1 km if we parked there.

However, we had seen more things along the woodland path.  The longer we walked, the more we saw, and the more photos I have taken.

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We had walked for about half an hour,  but the lake was still out of our visibility.

Another batch of protected plants with red tags.

Suddenly we reached a big piece of grassland.  Hey…  If you are using Windows XP default desktop wallpaper, try to compare to these photos.

When I was there, I felt that I have jumped into the Windows XP wallpaper.  It is not exactly the same but looks similar.

We took some photos and have some drinks (we were really thirsty).  First part of the journey exploring the reserve, I guessed we were the only group of people in the park.

Colin version of Windows XP wallpaper with SiewPeng and Colin (not forgetting our bag at the right corner as well).

Finally we found the lake, after walking across the grassland.

The following pictures were taken somewhere near the lake.  I will show you the lake in the coming post.

Not far away, there is a playground.

Stove for BBQ or cooking.

Do you know what this structure is built for?  They are the public toilets.

At the place I saw this board, the car park was just next to us but our car was not parked here.  We have no choice but walked for another 800 meters or 1 km back to our car.

Besides tiredness and hot, it was a great experience and we have had a happy time there.  While walking back to our car, I was far behind SiewPeng and her sister because I was busy taking photographs.  SiewPeng has lost her balance on the little hill at the grassland.  She fell down and her sister laughed at her.  I took their photos from far away and will keep these photos for ourselves.  :D

There is a round-shaped overbridge at Como Beach allowing pedestrians and cyclists to get across the Kwinana Freeway. It is connected to the Preston Street. The bridge is about one and a half stories tall and it is a good place to watch the sunset and view the scenery of the Como Beach.

I find the architecture of this bridge is full of artistic lines, I have written about it a year ago about this type of bridge found at Albany Highway (Cannington). This visit to Perth, I found at least another 4 or 5 round-shaped overbridges.

In the evening, when the sky is dark and the lights are switched on, it looks even more artistic.

Compared to the previous overbridge I found, this overbridge is bigger with a staircase in its middle. The staircase is for pedestrians because the circle is a long way to walk. SiewPeng and I have tried to walk on the circle, and it is really a bigger round.

Look at this picture, the freeway is just next to the beach. There is a big contrast just about 30 meters away (estimated). At one end I could see the busy road whereas the other end is the quiet beach with beautiful sunset in the evening.

I like to watch the cars and train passing by on the freeway but I did not stand too closed to the border and I make sure nothing was dropped especially my camera lens cap to the freeway with car rushing at 100 km/h.

This is the shape of the overbridge.

On the bridge, looking towards Preston Street.

Before we left, the sky has turned dark, we saw a young man with his small compact camera mounted on a tripod, taking the night scene. I remember I did that before too somewhere else in my hometown, my old camera was smaller than his camera, but my tripod was bigger than his tripod. Does this combination look strange? We walked pass him quietly, and he might not have noticed us.