Meanwhile photographer Geoffrey Dabb saw and captured a most spectacular rite of spring (and has called the picture Rite of Spring – Narrabundah) in which a peacock is trying to impress a peahen in that famously peacock-blessed suburb.

The peacock's spreading and brandishing of his tail like this is now thought to be perhaps not just a titillating display of splendour meant to make a female swoon with lust but a chance for her to examine the health of his feathers. If they are lustrous with good health then she feels (albeit subconsciously and without being able to put it into words) that together they will produce healthy youngsters.

Yes, you'd have to eat a great many of them to get a substantial feed but one of the many discoveries to be made in the new book Ngunnawal Plant Use – a traditional Aboriginal plant use guide (this heavenly blue picture is from the book) is that these native bluebells, the signature wild native plants of suburbia in Canberra's spring and summer, were eaten by Aboriginal peoples.

It was the flowers that were eaten, while, with lots of the beautifully-beflowered plant species pictured and discussed in the book it was the tubers or inner cores that were prized. So for example in the book there is the Yam Daisy, with pictures of its yam-like tubers that were eaten raw but were thought yummier when roasted.

Coincidentally, workers at the Australian National Botanic Gardens spent some of last week planting Yam Daisies and many of their cousins in a vast new bed (the Gardens' David Taylor, curator of living collections, says it is the size of between eight and 10 tennis courts) that is going to show off Australia's abundance of Asteraceae species, the daisies.

Lots of you we know count the sleeps until lurid Floriade (where, in spite of their alluring candy colours, you must refrain from eating the tulips) but the native plant nerds among us are counting the sleeps until 24 November when the Gardens' new Asteraceae extravaganza will open.

It will celebrate, Taylor advises, "the diversity of Australian daisies" and of course Australia being the botanical paradise it is, our continent is blessed with an abundance of daisy species found nowhere else on our planet.

We can't wait to tuck into this season's crop of bluebells but point out here that the bluebells of suburbia are various members of the Wahlenbergia family but are not Wahlenbergia gloriosa, the ACT's floral emblem. This is just as well because we would all feel as awkward nibbling our floral emblem as we would if we ate our faunal emblem, the Gang-gang cockatoo. Wahlenbergia gloriosa is a plant of lofty, alpine and sub-alpine places, and pines and pegs out in suburbia.

Ngunnawal Plant Use, produced by the flora-conscious ACT government with the expert assistance of ACT Aboriginal elders, can be purchased at discerning bookshops or by going to environment.act.gov.au