and three little kookaburras

At last! The kookaburras have landed!

I was gardening for friends yesterday. It was delightful. Their garden is what I'd call old-fashioned, crafted out of specimens such as a series of roses in whose presence I had to be pretty bloody nimble! It reminded me how gardening is an art that requires nurture, and possibly makes us more understanding, caring people. There is also a continuity or common link among gardeners that goes back centuries, even when their approaches are utterly different.
The one squatting is the young one.

The jacaranda's where I put minced beef most days. It's principally for the magpies I do it, but anything with two wings is welcome - especially anything marvelous! For me, gardening is an interaction with nature that allows me to facilitate improved conditions. Playing restauranteur is part of that.

Uncommon in much of Melbourne's sprawl, the kookaburra's unmistakeable, whooping chuckle seems to come out of ages past...but it's here, now...

here as I write this they're laughing. There were three that came today, and I'm hoping they stick around, now they know where there's some catering. Me? I make a garden so the world has somewhere it can sing with life.  

Glimpses of Life

 

Whatever changes are happening to the world's climates, the only certainty is their unpredictability.

East Melbourne is a plush corner of the world, a stone's throw from the CBD. Kept greener than most parts of Melbourne, it's nonetheless showing signs of strain...

the hardiest, most prevailing, most persistent plants struggle now to deal with rainlessness.

There are inventive solutions, though given that land is at a premium here, a few square metres are easier to maintain than a quarter acre, the size of an average Melbourne block.

This, above, is 'Queen Bess Row', with virtually no garden at all except for what blooms on its balconies. Will all of us in Melbourne, before too long, be obliged to curtail our gardening to a pocket of hope, a sort of play garden?

I hope it doesn't get that dire. The residents here have been successful in keeping their garden alive with yew, olive and native grasses - 

and these residents may have forgotten to clip their sprouting Muehlenbeckia columns, but they look so much better for it. And they've survived.

I can handle any sort of techniques, designs or ways forward that are capable of manifesting a garden in hostile conditions. What's getting hard to see is whether there's going to be much of any sort of garden left at all if climate continues to batter as belligerently as it is doing now. Oops, there goes the summerhouse...

There are those who create a response that is sustainable and elegant, such as here, with this slate, an idea I'm going to copy.

There are those who can afford to re-create sanctuary and in such sanctuary life continues unchallenged.

There are responses such at the landscaping at East Melbourne Library that utilise the toughest of natives and transpose them against a backdrop of new usefulness.

There's the ever-marvelous city-scape, able to inoculate itself against all pressure, for now, with its tiny wave towards the green.

There's the bastion, the little bit of the past that never says die.

And there's the Vespa I'd rather ride on, out of here, to a country that doesn't know of drought...

Shyness

Photographs taken of the land beside the property I live on, intended for public green space. It is the end of summer. Industrial equipment looks its best brand new or aged. In the in-between years, when there are both inclination and declination, there might be affliction, but there might also be the experience of grace.