garden

It's lovely how 'garden' is a noun and a verb. I've been watching Monty Don's series 'Around the world in 80 Garden's' and thoroughly enjoying it. He goes from country to country looking at lovely gardens and talking to gardeners, garden historians, garden-lovers and so on. All the gardeners look amazingly healthy and happy - it seems linked to the longevity of their gardening careers. Anyway I think I love it because I realise that I love gardens, love being in them and looking at them and smelling them and taking pictures - really love all that - but I'm not a very keen gardener. I get dejected by forever repotting and throwing away dead plants and stopping small people from ingesting potting mix. For this reason conventional gardening programs leave me cold - because I don't want to 'recreate the look' or find the exact plant for this or that soil. I don't want to hear about root-rot or pruning. I like the colour and feel of gardens, the patterns and textures. I love leaves and flowers. And I like to think about the links between the gardens people have and who they are.

my sister's garden in Fremantle

I went on a holiday to Fremantle for four days to see my sister. How lovely to travel peacefully solo, to take a break from early rising and toy-tidying. How amazing to visit a home where all items are not in the process of continual rearrangement. How lovely to get home and hear and see and hold my children.

bag painting

Two bag artists stand proudly by their work. I keep paper bags and every now and then we get them out and decorate a few for gift-bags. It was hard getting the logistics of this art project sorted out because Ella had everything carefully set up on a special little table that Jamie wanted access to so mucho shouting, shrieking and paintbrush snatching. This isn't the kind of vibe you hope for in a chilled out spring garden art project, but we pressed on. I hung the results to dry on the climbing frame and decided to take a few pics - both artists quickly edged into the frame to appear with their work.

it's spring and bees are buzzing

Our lavender has gone a bit crazy - tall stalks reaching out onto the pavement to tickle passers-by, bees buzzing busily. The wisteria has burst into leaf in three days - such a magnificent, luminous green - promising lots of shade for the front of the house on hot summer days. Skys are blue. It's getting warm. We are "dressed so summery" as Ella says.

open for business

In our garden - a small cafe.

Pink snow

Our tree, dropping it's blossom, covered our garden with a bright snow-like layer that reflected brightly into the kitchen bringing the sweet hope of spring. But two weeks later, everything's wet and gray and muddy out there. It's been freezing out and we're all going stir crazy and square-eyed, troubled by minor illnesses and generally not ourselves. "I am just not myself" says Ella "my tummy still hurts and I just can't stop coughing."

Grey - with colourful spots

We've had a lot of grey lately so I've been on the lookout for bright. There's a lot of it about, as they say, if you look closely.

Early morning

Early morning balloons. We are suffering a bit of TOO-EARLY at the moment. With small pre-breakfast snacks needing to be served to noisy boys at 6am when it is still pitch-black outside. So time to watch the sky brightening and balloons (our favourite balloons) float overhead.

Early morning Blossom. Dear Apricot tree - what are you up to? You've only just finished dropping the last of your leaves - but you do hate to be bare. While we were eating lunch a week or so ago Ella shouts "Mum - LOOK! Look out there!" She had seen the first blossoms breaking through, and when we went to explore and examine we were so happy to find the whole tree covered in bursting buds. It's only June - but this tree looks like and smells like spring, wafting it's fresh beautiful blossom-scent in through our back door.

Early morning tail. Do cat's sleep in? Never. This tail is taking a little quiet exercise before a full day of toddler tail-tainment. Trot-trotting into the frame comes one small boy, fluent in cat language, but deaf to these firm words: "SOFTLY, SLOWLY, GENTLY! And NOT his TAIL! NO! NO!"

This was posted by tamara (not Edward) - why does blogger insists on reorganising me?

Great Garden T

Just to surprise me, the winter garden has not completely perished. After spending loads of time (in my mind at least) in summer flapping about with potting mix, plant food and water for some pretty hard-to-spot results, I decided to give it all up for the winter while I pondered the problems of not enough sun, disappearing worms and Very Hungry Caterpillars. To expand: the worm farm seemed deserted, nothing grew much and what did grow was immediately munched up by a really healthy, happy herd of beautiful, fat bright-green caterpillars. So I left it all alone and expected nothing, but I noticed that the mint is BACK (sssshhhhh - don't tell the caterpillars), the parsley's poddling along, and the worms were just hiding - I snuck up on them one morning and caught them all diving into the compost. So I got a couple more pots at the market the other day and might get to reorganising the deckchairs soon and then giving them some more healthy neglect - as obviously the survival of the fittest approach is what works best for this garden. Don't be fooled though - it's not that great. I found a book the other day on Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh, which E and I visited in 2000 and got to longing for those lush greens and that blue ...