My silent visitors this morning
A third week of lockdown is obviously not a laughing matter.
July 2021
A third week of lockdown is obviously not a laughing matter.
July 2021
B. I see you were using that garden kneeler with the handles today.
G. Can’t get up off the ground after weeding without it.
B. You mocked me for buying that a few years back.
G. True. I did then. But the operative phrase is “a few years back”.
B. Have we gone downhill that fast?
G. The front garden certainly has. Now the fishbone fern’s taken over, passers-by probably think it’s a deceased estate.
B. They’d sure laugh if they could see our ancient garden tools. That fork with the broken handle and missing tine you were wrangling with yesterday. Our blunt saws. The rusty push mower we have to kick start.
G. Those tools’ll keep on keeping on. Like us. Remember my mother. At 90, she could still turn off a tap no human could turn on again.
B. And at 92 climbed out the back window of the garage after she’d locked herself in.
G. The crunch won’t come until we can no longer manage to put out the bins on Thursday nights.
June 2021
Couldn’t resist snapping these borlotti beans before I cooked them. Cooked, they lose their looks, though served with a slosh of oil, some parsley and garlic, who cares. Yum.
June 2021
Ten perfect flowers this year – a record! I inherited this pot of slipper orchids from my mother and she has been dead for over twenty years. I watched her watering them for a good twenty years before that. How old can a slipper orchid be?
May 2021
Hard to believe that this old gum tree, now under an ugly protective roof, was the live backdrop chosen for Capt Hindmarsh’s famous proclamation of South Australia in 1836. Yet it is still with us in situ in the bayside suburb of Glenelg in Adelaide.
The occasion was painted by Charles Hill, who, though he only arrived in the colony several years later, based his work on interviews with free settlers present at the time, many of whose actual faces he depicted.
Squint and you can just make out, on the left, two long tables being set up, presumably for the feast to follow.
May 2021
This little patch kept me in basil all summer so it deserves a rest for a while.
April 2021
Kissed from hibernation by a combo of raging summer bushfires and drenching rain, these rarely seen pink flannel flowers (actinotus forsythii) spread, in their hundreds and thousands, across a high ridge in the Blue Mountains under a veil of blackened banksia stalks. Add a swirling mountain mist and a view that stretches to the horizon – what a sight!
March 2021
Having only ever seen NSW Christmas Bushes (ceratopetalum gummiferum) in suburban gardens as medium sized shrubs, I was amazed to see this beautiful tall grove of them in the wild at Leura in the Blue Mountains. And showing their colour in late February in contrast to the Sydney suburban ones that are at their most festive in December.
February 2021
….that the architects of Federal Parliament House in Canberra in the 1980s had planted a mature Moreton Bay Fig tree on top.
It would have fitted perfectly with Burley Griffin’s vision…and by now be about 50 years young.
Instead, they put up a fancy stainless steel flagpole with no symbolic connection to Australia except it was made in Wollongong
February 2021
A rare and delightful event occurred last week. I was lucky enough to receive a bunch of flowers delivered by a real live florist…22 big fat tight buds of some sort of lily.
I immediately popped them into a vase of water and, having no experience in these matters, expected they would be gloriously open the next day. Not so. Tall and tight as a drum. Ah well. Maybe by day 3. No. By day 4? No. By day 5 I was beginning to despair. But day 6? Yes!!! Three open – hence this photo.
Will they all open eventually? Is it the gift that keeps on giving? Stand by for the next installment of this exciting unfolding saga.
January 2021