Oh joy! Spring has sprung at last. The grass is ris - a bit too quickly for my liking - and the birdies is where they ought to be: sitting on their nests and keeping their eggs warm.
I know that's so because there aren't nearly as many of them waiting in the huge old tree outside the front fence to demolish in a matter of minutes the stale bread or cake I feed them with every winter's morning.
And soon, praise God, memories will fade of that seemingly interminable winter - one of the bitterest on record in Rotorua, with, for instance, more than three times as many frosts as usual.
If, as one obscure proverb has it, spring has come when you can put your foot on three daisies, then it's here all right because I did just that on the front lawn when I mowed it last week.
In fact, such has been the sudden and rapid onslaught of spring that I have had to mow the lawns twice in the past two weeks and already they look as if they need another going over.
Why, with all the genetic modification that is going on, science can't do something really worthwhile and devise a grass that grows to a certain height and then stops I cannot fathom.
The same goes for hedges, the trimming of which occupied me for most of a day this week.
Spring is a magic time of the year.
Out in the backyard, a row of deciduous robinias, planted in the autumn, are one day bare, the next day budding and only a few days later covered in leaves.
The camellias along the drive are all of a sudden covered in fragile blooms which within days cover the ground in petals.
But they will keep on flowering for the rest of the season and are worth all the sweeping up that will have to be done.
The rose bushes around the section, pruned back to sticks for the winter, have sprung into luxuriant life and it will not be long before they, too, will be flowering.
In a week or two, the deck will be redolent with the perfume of roses, for we plant only scented varieties.
Inside the front fence, the magnificent young kauri (it's about 27 years old, so I am told) has taken on a new sheen and is already reaching further for the sky.
And around this leafy suburb, hundreds of flowering trees of all shapes and sizes have blossomed abundantly, hundreds of deciduous ones have sprung into leaf, and hundreds of evergreens are putting forth new growth.
My morning walk, free of thermal underwear, fleecy-lined tracksuit, heavy jacket and woolly hat and gloves, has become a delight to the eye, a vista of wondrous colour.
I have no fear that the canning of the intrusive and restrictive pruning regulations under the Resource Management Act - another big tick for the Key Government - will make one iota of difference to our sylvan environment, be it here in Rotorua or anywhere else.
We seem to have lost sight of the fact that the environment exists for man, not man for the environment, and we are perfectly entitled to shape it to our needs and desires, particularly on our own properties.
It is fair enough to protect by law trees of special age or significance - pohutukawa, for instance - but that is as far as it should ever have gone.
As I look around, I am awed once again by the infinite variety of God's wonderful creation: every tree its own unique green; every leaf its own unique shape; every flower its own unique colour and scent.
Even the varieties of roses each smell oh so subtly different.
And I am reminded that when He created us humans, God made us all infinitely varied and each unique too.
Not one of us has the same fingerprints, not one the same timbre to the voice.
Even identical twins are discernible to their parents and siblings.
On the outside, we are all different heights, different weights, different shapes; our eyes and our hair are all different colours; our faces, by which we recognise one another, are never the same.
Inside, we're all just as varied: we have different tastes, different ambitions, different interests, different likes and dislikes, different beliefs, different habits - the list could go on an on.
In the world of plants and trees, God's fascinating creation makes a wondrous, unified whole.
Rarely - at least in urban and rural New Zealand - does any tree or plant strike a discordant note among those around it.
I think He meant humans to be like that, too.
So away with uniformity, and the one-size-fits-all mentality.
One last thought, from the German novelist and humorist Jean Paul Archer: "Spring makes everything young again, save man."
Now ain't that a shame.
Garth George is a retired editor. He lives in Rotorua.
