Blog

While much of the country has been sweltering, we down south in Victoria have been enjoying the most perfect summer. We’ve had regular rains, and no days over 40C.  The countryside around me is sti ...

This post was published on the excellent on-line mag The Planthunter a couple of days ago (hence a few pics that regular readers of this blog will remember from earlier posts).  There’s no other p ...

I’m currently re-listening to an audiobook of a very light-weight novel about a late-teen in the mid 1950’s who’s family owns a massive house dating back to Medieval times, with a huge extension ...

How sweet are these words, at the end of a long article by one C. E. Baines. More succinctly (and with more humour, and humanity) than any other piece of writing that I know, these casual words acknow ...

Imagine a world before screens, when all images depended on reflected rather than penetrant light (OK, OK, except those in stained-glass windows). Go back earlier and imagine a world before photograph ...

It’s hard to face.  Difficult to accept. But it’s time for a new wheelbarrow. It’s astonishing, when I think about how much work my wheelbarrow has done over the last seventeen years.  With it ...

So I’m swanning around Washington DC, and wander into a huge bookshop, with the intention of checking out the garden books.  In the pre-internet days we didn’t see any American garden books in Au ...

So here’s the rest of the poem, following on from Monday’s post.  My point was that if real plants were truly in danger of being superseded, the media and the nurseries had to take partial respon ...

Well over a decade ago the Horticultural Media Association in NSW asked me to contribute to a kind of debate called ‘Gardens of the Future will have no plants’.  The timing was perfect, as Leo Sc ...

I really should have learned by now that the satisfaction/fun/pleasure returns from any particular job in the garden are nearly impossible to predict.  I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve p ...

It feels kind of lame to be writing about an observation that will have no impact without also explaining the problem to which it pertains.  It’s a bit like trying to explain a joke.  The best you ...

It has just this minute started snowing. The best part of it is that it’s just so beautiful. So wildly charming.  So emphatically silent.  It’s also (in this climate, at least), a universal stop ...

We’ve all got ‘em – those books that have changed or framed our lives.  In this case I’m sticking to the horticultural, or those that have fed into that part of my life ...

If anticipation is one of the assumed but rarely articulated responses that contribute an exquisite, almost painful ache to the whole garden thing, fragility is another. There’s something so poignan ...

The wall is coming along nicely – thanks for asking. But as is almost invariably the case for me, simple steps lead to big questions. For all sorts of reasons (septic tank placement/visual and physi ...

I’m really missing the days of untrammelled plant acquisitiveness.  They were the glory days – that period of time when I lived in one big happy world of new and interesting plants – all of whi ...

I’m currently deep inside Prince Charles’ book Harmony which, to put it very roughly indeed, explores issues of sustainability. The whole time I’m reading, I’m thinking about how this relates ...

Somerset Maugham wrote in his ‘The Summing Up’ that the only safe place to be in regard to ideas is to have so many of them that you don’t place too much weight on any particular one of them.  ...