As reported, a gardens' spokeswoman told us on Monday that she was "expecting right now" the arrival of the ribbons. Lo and behold they arrived the very next morning.

Tuesday's column, with wattles a'blooming now and with the anniversary of Hiroshima's bombing on all thinking minds, dabbled in the how and why of this annual gift of ribbons. Here is an authoritative explanation of it all, including the good news that, thank goodness, the wattle species in question is not the controversial and lurid-bloomed Cootamundra wattle Acacia baileyana.

This account comes from Maria Hitchcock's A Celebration of Wattle – Australia's National Floral Emblem.

"After the dreadful bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 it seemed that nothing would live again. Rumours spread that no plants would grow there for at least 75 years because of the radiation. Two months later, out of the ruins, arose a small green shoot, the seedling leaves of an Acacia dealbata [the silver wattle, sometimes called mimosa].

"The area had been planted with a row of them many years before. In Japan wattles have long been prized for the bright blaze of gold that marks the end of the northern winter, but now all were destroyed in the bombing.

"[However] Acacia seeds have a reputation in Australia for producing the first seedlings to emerge after a bushfire. Their very hard seedcoats can withstand very hot fires.

"The people of Hiroshima nurtured these seedlings, and planted hundreds more along Peace Boulevard.

"After this [in 1992] the Acacia Appreciation Society was formed and each year it sends 1000 yellow ribbons to the ANBG [where they are given to visitors to wear during their visit and then to take home to attach to a favourite tree or shrub]."

Unlike the trespassing Cootamundra wattle (Tuesday's column included a painted selfie of aesthete Oscar Wilde seeing its flowers and being horrified by them) Acacia dealbata is native to the ACT and to great swathes of Australia's south east. Wilde saw it, too, on his visit to the ACT and was aesthetically enchanted by its flowers of a shy, primrosey shade of yellow.

Meanwhile, still on springy things, readers continue to respond to our request for true harbingers of spring, for our own ACT equivalents of the famed "first cuckoo of spring" upon which Britons depend.

Almost all contributors have singled out signs in Nature, of which more in a moment, but this columnist is rather fond, too, of harbingers of spring in human behaviour.

One of the best of these every Canberra August, this year noticed around the lake on Sunday on almost the first warm-enough-for-shorts day of this bleak August, is the sight of the lovely luminosity of deathly pale Canberra legs. They are often runners' legs getting their first exposure to sunlight after months encased in Lycra tights.

It reminds of how, growing up in an English seaside resort, us ruddy-legged local urchins (wearing shorts the whole year round) used to chortle at the ectoplasmic pallor of holidaymakers' legs as they took their first tentative paddles in the chilly North Sea. We were sure there was nothing in the world whiter than pairs of sun-denied Manchester legs on an East Anglian beach, but last Sunday's legs around Lake Burley Griffin were comparably ghostly.

But back to Nature and surely, if Canberra is to have a bird equivalent (as a harbinger of spring) to Britain's cuckoo call it is likely to be something in the endearing behaviour of our magpies.

Thousands of us Canberrans feed 'our' magpies the whole year round and Russell and Louisa Wenholz of Holt suggest, cannily, that it is a sure sign of spring when the magpies that hitherto have eaten the mince themselves right there on the porch instead "load up their beaks with as much mince as possible and head back to the nest".

They report that 'their' magpies have been doing this for some days now.

Yes, magpies will begin swooping any day now, feeding our urban myths about them.

And this has been such a cold Canberra winter that one has half expected to see polar bears here. And sure enough those of you who take your imaginations to Wednesday's and Thursday's concerts by the Canberra Symphony Orchestra may see (in your mind's eye) polar bears in the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Legendary musicologist Donald Tovey thought that in the "exuberance" of the third and final movement he could hear "a polonaise [a dance of Polish origin] for polar bears".

Inexplicably the CSO's own publicity for the concerto makes no mention of the dancing polar bears but natters the usual cliches about the concerto taking us on a kind of tour of the Finnish outdoors.

A wit has said that writing about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture, but when a writer points out polar bears one had not previously noticed in a concerto (and once noticed you then see them every time you visit) he or she has surely performed a precious service.

There are no cavorting polar bears in the concerto's opening. It is whisper-quiet, and so, concertgoers, no coughing or rattling of the noisy foil of your cough lollies! Sensitive Sibelius tragic Marshall Walker in one of his "letters" to the late Sibelius fancied that "Like Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto yours begins without rhetorical flourish, giving the impression that the music has been playing before we've begun to hear it."

The Great War played havoc with True Romance. One hundred years ago this week "Celia" of Melbourne's Table Talk reported an imbroglio.

"The pretty fiancee of a Commonwealth warrior now at the Dardanelles had hardly dried her tears at his departure before embarking on a warm friendship with her fiance's particular pal. This friendship ripened into a love affair right under the very eyes of the departed young soldier's relatives and friends.

"One man, bolder than the rest, decided to bell the cat and address a few words in season to the [particular pal] who evidently accepted them in the spirit in which they were meant, as he promptly enlisted for service at the front. That the absent warrior is quite unsuspicious of the affair may be guessed from the tone of his letters, in which he eulogises the particular pal for being kind to the girl for the sake of her soldier fiance."

Meanwhile, "Celia" reported, returned men were partying hard in Melbourne.

"One of the wounded heroes from Gallipoli who had been kept up rather late at night strolled down to [a famous Melbourne pub] at 8am for a pick-me-up. He nearly fainted to find the bar-door closed. The shock was worse than the wound which brought him home.

"Our patriotic Government has decreed that al-hours drinking must be stopped during the war ... but the thought that he had been wounded for the sake of a country that curtailed hotel hours in his absence seemed to oppress him."