Horse and bergia?

The very first day of my gardening apprenticeship at Ripponlea, Melbourne, I was riding on top of a heap of rubbish on a trailer, and a work experience student was pointing out a few of the features o ...

It really doesn't take long

Of course it depends on your terms of reference. A year seems incredibly quick to me, to achieve a full and floriferous garden. But I have had people question me on my garden that I created and opened ...

Footpaths vs eyepaths

We McCoys went walking in Wilsons Prom on the long weekend.  Good weather rarely falls within my otherwise rich and wide blessing-spectrum, so I can only assume that we were among the many beneficiar ...

High Line the undeniable highlight

Christopher Lloyd, speaking to the Canberra Press Club in 1992 about the landscaping around the recently opened Parliament House stated that “the Landscape Architect clearly knew four plants,” the ...

Me? Overthinking?

OK, I’m seriously overthinking this.  I’ve been sitting here for an hour or so on a balcony overlooking an ancient sidestreet in Verona, trying to find an engaging angle on a particular garden th ...

The smell of September

Wandering along the old walls of Lucca this morning I kept passing through thin, vertical bands like curtains of a fresh, sweet scent.  Without conscious effort, my brain was madly googling through o ...

Water calls to water...

Revelation: water is a far more powerful presence in a garden than I’ve ever recognised before. You don’t need to go to an actual water garden like Villa d’Este to come to this understanding, bu ...

Turning my back on a crab

Lets be clear right from the outset – I’m not trying to generate sympathy when I start to mourn what I’m missing in my own garden while I’m away for the next month checking out gardens in Ital ...

Affirmation from Middle Earth

Doubled up on the couch with a crippling, hacking cough on Sunday, and for want of anything better to do, I put on the DVD of Fellowship of the Ring.  There’s old Bilbo beginning his book of advent ...

Penny - this post's for you

I’m still on the hellebore thing, and have just today got my hands on the most sensational macro lens – two good reasons to show some pics of Helleborus ‘Penny’s Pink’.  A third and altoget ...

Hellebores revisited

I can’t stop looking at these hellebores I’ve been given.  I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they reminded me of – where I’d seen that colour combination elsewhere in nature.  I kep ...

A nice, cosy, non-actionable think

All this practical stuff is setting my teeth on edge.  When I started out, I’d have been happy if the only physical action resulting from this blog was a slow, contemplative rubbing of the chin and ...

Meadows - Part the Final

How did I wind up doing this?  Three posts to answer a single question that should, by rights, require a book-length answer. But having checked out two simple paths to that meadow look, I can’t put ...

Lets call it a pre-Post

I’m supposed to be doing that promised final post on meadows.  But I want to shoot off on a short tangent just cos its current, and if I don’t do it now the moment will have passed. The miniature ...

Natives imprisoned in the bush

Natives are having a hard time escaping from the bush.  The best of the 1970’s bush gardens by Gordon Ford and Ellis Stones were magical – you know the kind of the thing – huge boulders swellin ...

The humbling

We’re lazy gardeners in Australia.  If we were willing to work half as hard as English gardeners to overcome the disadvantages of our climate while really celebrating its overwhelming advantages, w ...

'The Gardenist' - the book! Now in stores!

Check that video link on the right – called (helpfully) ‘The Gardenist Video’.  It’s a YouTube clip made by the publishers for booksellers, but it’ll tell you a bit about it. There’s a ne ...