Love the winter camellia carpets laid on the footpaths round my neighbourhood. Reds are the show ponies, but my favourites are the yellow and white poached eggs ones. 

July 2020

In the lockdown, solitary walks have allowed the mind to wander.

High above the cliffs at South Head, rain leaves small pools in the smooth sandstone.

Did some Gadigal women once sit beside these pools to chat and fashion the shell hooks they needed to fish for supper?

If they could see the area now!!

June 2020

Hydrangeas! In the garden in summery December with their pastel pinks and blue against the bright green leaves they looked so pretty. In the house in autumnal May with their deep russet tones they have another go at charming me.

May 2020

Hang this clock on your wall and on the hour, every hour,  a different Aussie bird will sing out to help you get through lockdown. 

Mmmm. Maybe getting back to work would hold some attraction after all. 

May 2020

Jobs that have been on the list for months are getting done. Yesterday, this cissus antarctica was leaping all over the shed, living up to its popular name – kangaroo vine. Today, I attacked it with the secateurs. Tomorrow, into the green bin it goes. How long did the job take? Less than an hour. Why have I been putting it off? Heaven knows. 

April 2020

Suburban koalas!!! Lucky me managed to spot that little lump in the fork of a gum tree one day last week.

March 2020

Answer to LP7

cup

B. Have you read the travel section yet? Seems every week there’s more and more garden tours advertised – Gardens of Morocco, Gardens of Chile. They all sound so tempting.

G. Wouldn’t tempt me in a fit.

B. Why not?

G. Spending three weeks with an earnest bunch of elderly gardeners with wide-brimmed hats, sturdy boots, day packs on their backs, carrying a shower-proof jacket just in case.

B. Mmm.

G. And every day they’d all be vying with each other to loudly identify each plant and triumphantly produce its botanical name.

B. Mmmm.

G. And every night over dinner they’d drone on about the way the state government cuts down every tree in sight, and the way their local council allows developments with metres of poured concrete rather than garden space.

B. Sounds absolutely perfect.

G. What do you mean?

B. You’ve just convinced me we’d be a perfect fit for such a tour. I’m going to book us one right now. Which would you rather? Autumn Colours of Japan? Cottage Gardens of Kent and Cornwall? Baroque Gardens of Central Italy?

February 2020

Could this be Australia’s slowest growing garden (take my word for it, it IS a garden)? If you look with the eye of faith, you can identify, clinging to these slabs of sandstone rescued from demolished colonial buildings, a variety of cructose lichens planted there by the Mt Annan PlantBank researchers. Considering lichens grow at the rate of about a centimetre every ten years, it’s going to be a long wait for coverage.

February 2020

Being a hopeless photographer, I have no idea why these floating nardoo leaves (marsilea drummondii) came out looking white when they were a deep green to look at. Nevertheless, the reason I took the photo was that, at the very time I spied the plant in the Mt Annan Botanic Gardens, I was re-reading the Burke and Wills story and was up to the part where, virtually on their last legs, the 2 men were fed for a few days on nardoo cakes the friendly aborigines made for them out of crushed nardoo roots. Apparently nardoo is a good survivor even without surface water.

January 2020

Who needs holly or a trad fir tree at this time of year when you have a cheerful lillypilly by the front gate that gleams festively through the smoky haze?

January 2020