The Colour Before Green

A Trail of Yellow

Season’s Signature · Melbourne · Spring 2026

Crop It?

I nearly did.

A spent bloom amongst the yellow. Brown. Dry. Its season gone.

Never before have we had so many ways to reshape what appears within a frame. We can crop, filter, retouch, erase, and now even generate what was never there. The possibilities are almost boundless. I have embraced these evolving technologies myself. I have watched a painting of my own making expand beyond the canvas, its imagined world carried further than my untrained hand and brush alone could take it. Sometimes they make visible what imagination already knows, revealing what neither the hand nor the camera can quite bring into view.

But this image asked something different of me: no filter, no removal, no reconstructed spring, only a single spent bloom amongst the yellow, with green gathering around it.

At first, it was the thing I thought interrupted the photograph. Yet removing it would have changed more than the composition. That spent bloom belonged there, even before I understood why.

Melbourne does this, pairing warmth with cold, sun with rain, winter with spring, as though each season is reluctant to leave before the next arrives.

Seasons Before

We are drawn to what flowers because it gives us something tangible to celebrate: abundance and renewal, life declaring itself in colour and light. Spring photographs effortlessly. What comes before is quieter. Through winter, growth slips from view. Flowers fall, leaves weather, branches are laid bare. What appears dormant may simply be gathering itself, storing energy, waiting for the season to turn.

Nature does not clear away one season before beginning another. In Melbourne, September rarely arrives as a clean break. A bright morning can fold into rain, warmth can disappear beneath a cold change, winter can linger in the shade while spring catches the light.

Then, somewhere amongst those shifting conditions, yellow appears. At first here and there, then again, until you realise it has been quietly leading you all along.

A Trail of Yellow

On a crisp spring morning along the Mornington Peninsula coast, shrubs of yellow coloured the trail ahead. Much of the landscape was still waking, the morning dew lingering as the warmth of the sun began to seep through.

The wattle was already awake.

Yellow followed along the path, breaking through the coastal vegetation in bursts. Magpies sang above, and as the landscape became  saturated with morning light, yellow deepened to gold against the darker greens. Once I noticed it, yellow became impossible to ignore.

Perhaps there is something familiar in those colours. More than a thousand species of wattle grow across Australia, from coastal environments and mountain ranges to tropical forests and arid inland regions. Among them is golden wattle, Acacia pycnantha, recognised as Australia’s national floral emblem. In flower, it displays the green and gold that are also Australia’s national colours. Fittingly, National Wattle Day falls on 1 September, the first day of Australian spring.

The recognition came later. In the moment, there was only the quiet persistence of yellow, scattered through the landscape, catching the eye before so much else had fully awakened. Meaning followed observation.

The wattle I stopped to photograph was not necessarily the golden wattle of the national emblem. Its globular flower heads and conspicuous spines appear consistent with prickly wattle, Acacia paradoxa, a species native to Victoria that flowers from August to November.

That distinction makes the encounter more fitting, not less. Here, on this stretch of Victorian coast, the wattle was not standing in for Australia. It was simply flowering in its own place and season, leading me, for a while, along a trail of yellow.

There was more than colour announcing it. Its scent lingered along the trail, clustered flowers softened harder branches, and the morning warmth settled over the landscape. Moving closer, those soft golden spheres revealed sharp spines amongst the bloom. Softness and defence occupied the same space.

Within a single branch, time seemed to unfold at different speeds. Some buds still held tight, others had opened into full colour, while nearby flowers were already beginning to fade. Nothing waited for the rest to catch up. Opening, flowering, fading, all belonged to the same moment.

In the Same Frame

And there it was, the part I had almost cropped away.

Amongst the yellow, one bloom had already lived its season. Beside it, another was opening, a bud was still waiting, and a spine sat amongst the softness. Nothing arrived alone.

Four seasons in one day is something we say about Melbourne without thinking. But here, on one branch, it was smaller and quieter: the opening and the fading, the softness and the spine, what was arriving beside what had already been.

That is Melbourne’s signature. Not four seasons neatly divided, but one leaning into another. And there, in the smallest part of the frame, was the whole of it.

The Colour Before Green

For a while, the trail is yellow. Then green gathers around it.

The flowers soften, fade, and fall. What seemed so vivid becomes quieter until the colour that announced the season is no longer the colour we see.

But it was there before the green filled in, before spring became certain.

A trail of yellow, colouring winter’s edges.