Driving to a clients place a few years back, I was all but blinded by this outrageous garden en route, bursting at the seams with Gladiolus dalenii. I had to stop and take some pics. (Apologies for ...
Some time late last night, while no one was watching, that deceptively feeble looking shoot made it to the top Now it should start photographing me, to measure the response time taken to establish the ...
I was lounging on the verandah Saturday afternoon and, with nothing else to dwell on, was wondering (loungingly) if the feeble little vertical shoot of wisteria that had finally got the idea of wind ...
Honestly, how can it take so long to learn such simple lessons? I’m more than happy with the idea that gardening can keep you on a steep learning curve for a lifetime, but I really thought that wh ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...