It's always a great weekend when you can get out into your garden, and even better when you can enjoy God's garden. I took my son down to one of our favourite camping haunts, Conto's Field, on the weekend for a little R&R and some father/son bonding. While we had a few pastimes that we intended to engage in most of our time was unallocated - the best way for any weekend.

Fishing was high on the priority list and it quickly appeared that the fish understood this and made themselves scarce. Not to be deterred, we tried multiple locations and different times of the day without as much as a nibble. Fortunately, when fishing in the South-West there is always more than one thing to do. If it gets hot enough (it didn't!), you could strip down and go for a dip, or spend time making castles in the sand which was sadly lacking in this rocky coastline.

Fortunately we stumbled upon two great delights - a pup NZ fur-seal sunning itself on some nearby rocks and a heap of rock crabs that taunted us as they zipped across the slimy surfaces with consummate ease.

We were quite surprised with the number and variety of fauna that we discovered on our weekend; the fur-seal, a local hawk, a Quenda (southern brown bandicoot) and possum joined us for dinner, kangaroos, kookaburras, magpies, wrens, rosella parrots, crabs and even a murder of crows played their parts to perfection.

I joked with my son that we should probably go and discover some new local nurseries to which he responded that we had no need to. His argument was that the native flora was already spectacular enough and anything we found in the nurseries was going to pale in significance. Touche.

This is Diplolaena microcephala, a common shrub in our dry wheatbelt regions but was happily growing in the sand dunes adjoining the coast. I swore that I would be back to take a cutting and that I would never leave home again without my secateurs, to which my son rolled his eyes heavenward.

This Pimelea sp. was no slouch either breaking into blossom not too dissimilar to watching fireworks ascend the skies. It was so glorious I wanted to dig it up and take it home with me - not that we're allowed to do that with our natives, thankfully! We returned back to camp and then went off for another bush stroll discovering this vast field of freshly blooming pussytails. Number one son, having never experienced snow, thought this might be the closest thing he might enjoy and started gracefully performing 'pussytail angels'.

Our final part of the weekend was discovering an un-tourist-ified cave which we tried exploring the day before - without a lantern (dumb move) - but decided to revisit on our way home. It was incredible. Stalactites suspended from the cavernous ceiling dripping onto their evergrowing stalagmites below were awesome in their size, appearance and colours. It wasn't a large cave compared to the many found in this region but was certainly worth the effort.