tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60797224351862656972024-03-13T23:17:59.687-07:00Gardener in the Distance...gardening and belonging in Ballarat.Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.comBlogger201125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-88358922411745489002015-07-05T00:50:00.000-07:002015-07-05T00:53:11.163-07:00Thermal and Not so Thermal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here I am wrapped up in my cloaks, cold itself.<br />
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Well, no. I'd got out on my bicycle today to the Ballarat Botanical Gardens in a sudden and unexpected blaze of winter sunshine. Here you're looking out from the Gardens across Lake Wendouree.<br />
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Winter's an honest time. There's no dodging the fact significant signs of life have vanished. And yet, significant signs of life are surfacing.<br />
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Bravo, Hercules, I say.<br />
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Confession: I'd got out on my bike to sweep clear the remnants of a late night spent in front of an open fire, risotto and red in hand. Did I deserve such beauty?<br />
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There are Sequoias and Redwoods and Firs here, here in this Victorian, ordered space, one of my very favourite places in the world, where not so long ago others promenaded without a bicycle, but perhaps too with a little hangover and with a sense of occasion.<br />
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What joy it was to see these Hellebores up. Did I say that Ballarat is the coldest place in the world? Forget Scotland, forget Antarctica...remember Ballarat.<br />
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Here's my favourite ever flower, one of the Banksias, blooming in the cold as so many of us natives do.<br />
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And another. This is winter? You could have fooled me and my heating bill.<br />
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I AM THE LION, warm and warming, he says...<br />
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...however cool the prospect...Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-51705449193096601712015-05-28T06:12:00.001-07:002015-06-01T20:44:29.954-07:00Bunny and the Quinces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This little rabbit was out on a trip to Buninyong ( "Bunny" ), south-east of Ballarat. Above, he was captivated by the Anglican church.<br />
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And shortly after, by this former brewery, now a dwelling, on the banks of the spring-fed lake at the centre of Buninyong's Botanic Gardens.<br />
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This is as old as it gets in this part of the world, what with gold being found in a new land, and substantial headway being made.<br />
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This came later, this 'Queen Victoria's Rotunda'. It's still here, for anyone to enter.<br />
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If this were only an historical re-enactment I'd have scampered, but the stones are local and warm and they belong here.<br />
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Some of the trees are somewhat magnificent. There are poplars and redwoods but I confess to a fondness for the local Eucalypts, loose and strong as they are.<br />
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We're not talking about Endless Tourism here, but about a little gracious space, off the beaten track.<br />
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She doesn't look fabulous this time of year, what with all of her leaves fallen. But she is stately and benevolent, this backwoods grande dame.<br />
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The neighbours believe so, and take care appropriately. <br />
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I just got off a bus and I was there. Nobody bothered me.<i> </i>I'd like a bit of space like this myself when I stepped out back...<br />
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...you can see it's quince weather. When Buninyong was built, there was huge money got from the local gold. Above is any one of a number of fine examples of placement or state or statement of place.<br />
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More trees, and a bit of a windmill behind them. The trees get to be gargantuan in certain places here, here with rich volcanic soils, if a now unpredictable climate, including that climate's droughts.<br />
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This little bunny got his quinces from the Buninyong Information Office for the ridiculous sum of $2.40, so he will have to remember just why it is he loved it so. He loved it for being so natural, so of itself, so accepting of a stranger.Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-73726094374310367542015-03-26T22:02:00.000-07:002015-03-27T05:26:40.909-07:00Dark into Light<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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These are shots taken from around Ballarat and from within my home, also in Ballarat. They're pertinent here, I feel, because they point to an aesthetic that guides my gardening and is embodied in my gardening, as well as it guides everything I do, or like to do, and is embodied within these, I hope to say.<br />
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I say this while near at hand and at ear someone or some more than one is or are using a whipper snipper and a lawn mower.<br />
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I refrain from using machinery wherever possible, believing that machinery somehow injures the world.<br />
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Many will disagree, saying that such is the way of the world. But I will dig my heels in. I like it quiet. I like that a garden opens itself to whoever wants to be there, that it's not to be approached as if it were in need of militant control. <br />
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Well, yeah, militancy may be required when dealing with prickly customers. But does militancy need to be employed as a final solution? A garden is about <i>breathing</i>, about <i>space</i>, about <i>feeling unrestrained</i>, yet<i> safe</i>. The whipper-snipperers and mowers are continuing. I sit at my desk dazed and Zara is concerned, to say the least.<br />
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What's it all about, that we have to employ machinery, of the loud and ruthless variety, in those spaces we regard, or as I regard, as refuges? I'd prefer it if they hadn't been invented. Oh, yes, I'm being unrealistic. But is something more real just because it's more insistent? I will never believe so.<br />
It's getting semi-quiet, in the aftermath. Some of the unheard birds are starting to be heard again. Zara's waiting to be taken outside for walkies.<br />
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In my home, here, as much as in my garden, I like to let nature take its course. There's something about machinery I find unnatural. The piece of bark, above, I found recently, took its tree a hundred or two years to make, without machinery. It happened without loud noise, without intrusion, unquickly. So what's got into everybody that only machinery will make things happen? And why does everything have to happen quickly? We've been around long enough to know that time takes forever.<br />
<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-6234752907775958072015-03-08T03:18:00.003-07:002015-03-08T03:18:53.842-07:00Ambling to Lambley<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I hope I do justice here to the finest and most beautifully laid-out plantsman's nursery I've ever been to.<br />
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Hidden in a quiet, elegant, olde world stretch of farmland near to Ballarat, at Ascot, <a href="http://lambley.com.au/">Lambley's Nursery</a> speaks of history, longevity and ingenuity. <br />
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I can't believe what David Glenn has achieved. With a view to providing plants that cope with dry conditions, he avoids commonly seen succulents. Everything here blooms abundantly. There are bees everywhere. <br />
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Here you can see a part of Lambley's Nursery's Dry Climate Garden. It could be anywhere on the Mediterranean. What we noticed made it most effective, what helped it all work, was its confinement within walls of green hedging.<br />
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As usual, I kind of liked the edges of the garden, as seen here, this water tank. It was such a beautiful day, the end of summer, the start of autumn.<br />
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David Glenn has a superb sense of colour. There are purples, reds and yellows everywhere. His gardens, the spaces he contrives within his gardens, are flamboyant. But they're disciplined. There are vegetables beside perennials, fruit beside groundcovers. I didn't know how much it's all functional and how much it's all decorative - a good sign of an original maker. <br />
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This isn't a chain-store. It couldn't be repeated regardless of territory. Everything here belongs and shows how we can belong to the land we have by caring for it appropriately. And making more of it than may be expected.<br />
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This is a detailed garden, or a cluster of detailed gardens. Everything has a purpose. You feel that everything is well-chosen.<br />
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As it is in Clunes, one of the most beautiful towns in Victoria, where we found our way to, after getting somewhat lost down single-lane roads.<br />
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Does 'intact' mean anything any more? I hope so. As Australia's most famous 'book town', <a href="http://clunesbooktown.com.au/">Clunes</a> demonstrates how meaningful the past is, and how necessary it is to keep and cultivate the past, not just any fashionable notions of the future.<br />
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I can't help taking you back to Lambley's for a moment, where the past and the future commingle with great elegance. 'Is gardening dead?', some people ask. Not here. Not if we don't want it to be dead. Gardening will be alive as long as we have hands. It will continue to define us as human.<br />
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I don't always believe in the newest trends. More to the point, I find most of the newest trends unreal. From Lambley's bursting gorgeousness to the streetscape of Clunes, I prefer a certain durability, a certain confidence in what's been and what can be, to what should be according to unreliable notions of marketability. But what is most peculiar, is that the most interesting newness comes out of the past.<br />
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-24103649878435202712015-01-31T06:07:00.000-08:002015-01-31T06:07:08.640-08:00Cycling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I see boys whizzing by on their bikes, fed with the fresh country air. There's insufficient traffic to impede them.<br />
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Here, whatever may be thought, it's quiet. I feel that no-one wants any trouble.<br />
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Perhaps I'm among people who've had enough trouble and are simply mending.<br />
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The bus stops outside and a door bangs. Someone decides to do some gardening.<br />
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The voices might be gruff. There are undertones and overtones.<br />
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I belong here, here in a life where a warren of gold mines once made this the most prosperous of corners in the known world, but where the human beings beside me are grappling with the everyday.<br />
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Or <i>handling</i>, it's better said, as I am handling <i>the everyday. </i>We are handling whatever it is, our place, in a cycle. For me, it's a whole new one.Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-61994561962708986632015-01-29T04:11:00.000-08:002015-01-29T04:19:14.991-08:00Eureka!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'm seeing my transition to Wendouree in Ballarat in the light of Derek Jarman's to Dungeness, less distinctive as the experience and outcome might be...<br />
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Unable now to afford anything liveable in Melbourne's inflated rental market -<br />
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unable, at 56, to find employment - as a bookseller, or as anything else; and with an effecting health condition:<br />
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I last year applied for Public Housing and was recently informed that I'd got it.<br />
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Where I am might seem to be neglected or down at heel but I don't feel threatened whatsoever. I'm not only happy: I feel blessed.<br />
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Whatever my past has been, this is an altogether new life I've been given, at a new site and with a new sense of what life is capable of being. I've begun humbly but safely, with considerable freedom and considerate neighbours...<br />
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...the world began after nothing, and then there was a spark.<br />
<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-22719655326322181952014-12-25T04:43:00.001-08:002014-12-25T04:43:23.891-08:00There's No Gardening Today...<br />
In an attempt to retain whatever readers may still be visiting, and to say hello to you...here are some shots of my Christmas, a non-gardening day. May your own days, in the garden or out of it, be just as happy, my friends...<br />
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XXX, Faisal.<br />
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-19494751291464826812014-11-08T01:47:00.001-08:002014-11-08T01:47:49.833-08:00Big Bad Bunyip<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As far as I perceive, entities such as the Bunyip that were said to inhabit the Aboriginal landscape of Australia do so still, though we've dismissed them as imaginary. The town of Bunyip, 80 km east of Melbourne is <i>not</i> imaginary. It's only my fascination with an old property for sale there that might be classified as such. <br />
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With this as its driveway though, you can see how easy it was for me to be enchanted. The <i>St Thomas' Anglican Church Bunyip Annual Flower Show and Market </i>notwithstanding, I had no otherwise strong reason to go there, to Bunyip. <br />
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It's not exactly prime real estate, what with its various sheds a bit more than knocked about...<br />
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...and one or two details requiring attention.<br />
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But with this as a back garden, I was dreaming of all that could be done, of the forest I'd make, with a Japanese air.<br />
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This, above, is the view of surrounding countryside from the township's hillside position. Some people would call it a view <i>to die for.</i><br />
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Near to the train station are some spectacular trees, such as this scarified Eucalypt.<br />
Just because something's showing signs of wear and tear doesn't mean it should be bulldozed, I told myself. For me, in truth, it's just these signs I find most appealing.<br />
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So, it doesn't look like I'll be buying an acre in Bunyip and building a dream garden there. I consoled myself with a glass of wine in <i>The Top Pub</i> instead... <br />
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...finding beauty, not beasts, everywhere.<br />
<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-48855481980027070222014-10-11T02:38:00.001-07:002014-10-12T04:09:48.393-07:00Not Gardening, Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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To anyone interested, I just want to let you know about a new blog I have, for my writing. It's not actually a matter of choosing either gardening or writing when I'm asked what matters to me. They complement one another. But I'm needing to be spending some time inwards, writing, and less, out there, in the garden. Though Blogger has made it difficult or impossible to Follow now, I hope you might want to take a look at this new venture.<br />
Its address is: <a href="http://recapturefaisalgrant.blogspot.com/">recapturefaisalgrant.blogspot.com </a>Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-81305220236325288392014-09-26T02:47:00.001-07:002014-09-26T02:47:56.324-07:00Dullville<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's occurred to me that despite a stated claim, I only infrequently include pictures of my own garden. One of the reasons - and there are perfectly innocent ones too, such as that I like to get out and about where the grass seems to be greener - is that what I have and what I have done are nowhere near good enough to expose to public scrutiny.<br />
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Photographs lie. Or is it that photographers do? Photographs purport to tell the truth, in this information age, much more nearly than a more creative interpretation might.<br />
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But a photographer selects and excludes. A photographer draws your gaze to an object...and the photographer diverts your gaze from other objects. As I am doing here, see? I don't want to show you Dullville so I show you some pruned apple branches flowering in a pot.<br />
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<i>"The Gardener Opens His Toolkit", </i>but this is not my toolkit. I don't even have a toolkit. I just have some bits and pieces I use, alot of them, in themselves, not photogenic. But I decided to spare you the pain of seeing reality.<br />
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This above is, apparently, a genuine gardening toolkit as used by a genuine gardener. But, reader, Faisal concocted it this afternoon, hoping to enthrall you. Sadly, some of the apparent tools this gardener uses are impractical, if not inapplicable, in any real life garden setting.<br />
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Or perhaps not. However little like any photogenically sumptuous garden my own garden may be, I find that, yes, I can use in it materials that have not come from any authorised or topical source. And as a gardener, I can act without regard to any gardening trends... <br />
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as the shoes above indicate. It has to be said that I get about in my slippers sometimes, and once in a blue moon, in a purpose-built pair of heavy workman's boots. But these are what I trip about in. So, at last, here is a real photograph of a real thing, or of a real pair of things. <br />
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This is another, <i>Eucalyptus caesia </i>staked and tied. An unglamorous if satisfyingly rustic shot, it nevertheless shows what's what, even if it doesn't show the ugly chicken wire fencing nearby. There we go...the photographer pretends to be real, while at the very same time excluding the unsatisfactory or disappointing. <br />
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The photographer is trying to show you what matters to him. From out of all the degradation and the rusting and the blights of our days, flowering is forever. Even here, in Dullville. Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-25240394961813564842014-09-20T04:30:00.003-07:002014-09-20T05:28:54.980-07:00winterflower<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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My apprentice enjoyed some upholstery after a day of digging in the keen, if overcast air of Ballarat.<br />
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I, too, got down to alot of digging...I won't show here all the nitty-gritty of my working holiday because it was, well, a bit gritty...<br />
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Blessed with more lichen and hovering clouds than any other site on the planet, if not any site within driving distance of Melbourne, Ballarat in winter might seem uncomfortably chilly, especially when you're on your knees without upholstery -<br />
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but it flowers profusely. I was here to plant out a million Camellias, 30,000 Roses, a truckload of Dogwoods, sackfuls of Hellebores, piles of Cliveas and just a scratch of Raspberries.<br />
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I wouldn't like to know I couldn't go to Ballarat again. Near to where I laboured, with only the odd lamb roast and glass of red to defrost me ( weep, gardener, weep ), a new development is appearing. Against the usual odds, it's keeping its ancient Eucalypts, <br />
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here beside the Ballarat Golf Club. I haven't a clue, myself, how to swing one of those irons. It would be enough just to wander around...<br />
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and smell the roses or the grasses, <br />
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or these other wonderfully alien forms ( the identity of which I claim complete ignorance ).<br />
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OK. I'd say that if you can get something like this wriggling out of your lawn you're doing well. What did I see? I saw countless front lawns without fences, windows daringly open to the street. I saw armfuls of Daffodils. And lichen covering almost everything. I didn't want to stop in case I was next - <br />
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but, as you can see, there's so much new life, the lichen will have to move quicker.<br />
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I'd entered a gate into another world, with gardens and gardening charmingly different to Melbourne's. So often, when you garden, you can be so intent on the ground in front of you, you forget what's happening down the road, or 120 km away. So now I remember. Is there room on the couch for another snoozer? Zara?Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-85991073744430218892014-09-10T22:07:00.001-07:002014-09-10T22:07:44.178-07:00Signing Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It looks like I'm going to be doing volunteer work now, for a major heritage organisation.<br />
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Having been intermittently unemployed over the last several years, I've had to ask myself if my job - bookselling - or, if any job, were worth the dedication I've put into mine. <br />
I'm feeling that most of us spend the best part of our life locked into a routine that becomes increasingly meaningless. Too late, we find ourselves taking a short trip to a tropical isle before we face the remainder of our finity girdled by high blood pressure and cardiac malaise.<br />
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However poor I'm going to be, I would sooner be living until I can be quietly transubstantuated, rather than be dying by a force I hadn't reckoned with. It's not OK giving all of my life to an employer or an employment role and then finding myself cast aside with questions unanswered.<br />
The signs are out there, as these were, along my bus trip. I am viable. I am not owned by anybody. It might look like I'm copping out, but by letting go of the notion of being a worldly success, I'm voluntarily accepting a destiny that will connect me to a greater purpose, beyond the moment. Fame, power and position aren't part of that.<br />
I prefer to be finding the beautiful in the mundane. I prefer to belong to another world, not this here and now thing. I prefer up to down. And I prefer to believe I'm being guided, not that I'm being abused. Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-72965924922466695102014-09-05T03:49:00.000-07:002014-09-05T22:47:53.474-07:00Simply<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This garden isn't a showpiece. And I am only the tenant.<br />
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I was going to write about <i>The Art of Gardening</i>, using my formerly lumpen, now shapely compost heap as an illustration of how anything rudimentary can be made beautiful.<br />
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But it's too hard to think about. It's easier for me to show you these Eucalypts rising out from beside the shapely, formerly lumpen compost heap.<br />
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This is why I garden, and why for me it's an art. I like to continue the continuity of life, or to be part of that continuation.<br />
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It's nearly spring here. The birds and the buds are leaping. These <i>Freesias </i>came from my grandmother's garden in Adelaide. They smell like a heavenly fruit salad.<br />
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I am weak, often, in spring: weak with the labour. I don't mind going slower, finding myself more diligent. Besides, I too, what with my feelings of liberty, feel spring's vigour.<br />
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I make gardens to make a space wherein apparent timelessness is allowed. Work, yes, but it's honourable and simple.Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-54155391107335150052014-08-15T03:05:00.001-07:002014-08-15T06:05:04.610-07:00What we all need: a flag and a staff<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is in Melbourne, a comparatively new city, a sense of ongoing expansion. It would be a graceless expansion if that expansion obliterated the existing beauty from out of which it, that expansion, expands.<br />
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Street-life, cities, the movement of people...these all need to work circumspectly, and together.<br />
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I was off to the <i>Flagstaff Gardens </i>in William Street, West Melbourne, on the edge of the city. But there was plenty to see in the built world, before I got to the unbuilt.<br />
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There's so much to be fond of, in Melbourne. Of course, you'll need to do some hunting, get on a bike or a tram. This part of Melbourne, not yet subsumed by development, has some of its oldest remnants.<br />
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This is <i>St James Old Cathedral</i>, the oldest church in Melbourne, as seen from the <i>Flagstaff Gardens</i>, doing its best to wave its flag in a sea of not altogether congruous newness<i>. </i><br />
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The oldest park in Melbourne - established 1835 - these 18 acres of - '<i>reality</i>', I want to say, but OK then - 'free space' - allow the wandering city worker to get a glimpse of what life was like here before money and careers and even <i>time</i> perhaps were invented.<br />
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As much as there's nothing like strolling through perfect grounds, I like to be able to see what's happening, here in a space still elemental.<br />
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There ARE some garden beds, a little disparate, semi-tendered, but comforting anyway.<br />
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And memorials. This memorial above was erected in 1871, "<i>In the memory of some of the earliest of the Pioneers of this Colony whose remains were interred near this spot"</i>. The <i>Flagstaff Gardens</i> have long since welcomed those needing some shelter.<br />
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The former Royal Mint, nearby, a stone's throw away, has new tenants.<br />
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Many of them may have only been represented. Though temporarily closed for renovations, The Mint had not long ago "An exhibition celebrating the lives of those who came to Australia during the period of mass assisted migration post 1952". </div>
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I'd hope that all the money that had churned through this city, leaving a multitude of questionable developments, had allowed for more to be opened for a bright future </div>
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and for a remembrance. Without <i>means</i>, we may as well all be statuary.<i> </i>But it is with a <i>staff</i> of some kind that we can move forward </div>
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and stop sometimes.</div>
<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-24090958671830516472014-07-30T23:52:00.001-07:002014-07-30T23:52:26.022-07:00hortinterior<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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fruits and circles, binding ties<br />
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the shock of encounter<br />
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ways of approach<br />
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value, merit and gift<br />
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response and repletion<br />
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destiny captured; sustenance<br />
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a new viewGardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-23664340676423634122014-07-23T08:28:00.001-07:002014-07-23T08:28:12.756-07:00An Other Self<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In our life, alot of it's unknown to others.<br />
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Here for only a brief interlude, I dragged my friend from <i>Den Haag </i>to Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, where we did a circuit of <i>Guilfoyle's Volcano</i>. Everything you see can be different every time you see it.<br />
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I have to admit I like a grandness, but I also go for rustic, roughness and suddenness.<br />
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This is one of a handful of pavilions in the Gardens. It is odd, is it not, this dream that has been made real?<br />
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Glory be to both the constructed and to the evolving, the man-made and the organic. It's OK to say that, isn't it, in this world of ours that's become so hurt?<br />
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If we're dumb enough to obliterate nature, then we might as well obliterate all meaningful connection. How can anybody be wanting to shoot anything when the origin and reality of shooting is an expression and affirmation of life? Plants shoot up into the sky...but we're so stupid we shoot each other. Myself, I don't get that. Love and life are not about collapse. They are about renewal.<br />
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The swans are quite possibly wiser than many of the tourists who snap pictures of them. They just get on with their life, however peculiar humans have become...<br />
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Sometimes you take a different path to the one you might be expected to take. It can be startling, getting to be an other self. <br />
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But it is known that comfort is available. In the <i>Mauritshuis,</i> Gerrit Dou's doggy is replete. I caught him napping. It's not like life is some kind of alienating experiment. It's a gift.<br />
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-79167253780597476212014-07-05T03:35:00.002-07:002014-07-05T03:35:39.057-07:00Scene through a Window<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Most of these photos come from the inside of a train window as I traversed Melbourne today.<br />
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It's not infrequently said that train travel quietens the mind and lets a deeper and more receptive state to be felt.<br />
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It's the rhythm, some say, the rocking and the rolling -<br />
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even now, when trains shoot and glide and jolt without apparent rhythm -<br />
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or else there's a feeling of being safely encapsulated, of being <i>transported.</i><br />
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From a train we see others' backyards and may take comfort that not everything around us is front.<br />
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We're going somewhere, and in going to that somewhere, we can go as we are.<br />
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A train view affords a wider, more encompassing, less judgmental perspective.<br />
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Train travel isn't simply hypnotic and lulling; sometimes it's bold and dramatic. There's alot more out there than our non-traveling lives allow us.<br />
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It's not only the inconvenient and neglected we get to see from the train, but very often the grand or the subtle and the stretch of history that lets us feel we belong.<br />
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This isn't much of a shot, I guess, but it's here because it's near where I grew up, right next to the station I went to school from. So the past is reassuringly present.<br />
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This final shot is somewhere I walk now and then, as I did today, and does not come from a train. But it could easily be a train-view, unexpectedly and humbly elegant as it is. Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-6121148108113178872014-06-20T03:07:00.000-07:002014-06-20T03:12:58.908-07:00Cabbage and King, Horticulturalists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-81259705985048569902014-05-16T02:59:00.001-07:002014-05-16T06:54:28.534-07:00Oh, for the Fizz...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I'd been to my physiotherapist, to get my back strong and straightened. It began when I was at school, my bad back, when I lent over my desk at nights studying hard for too long, over subjects I sometimes liked and sometimes hated. I knew it was going to be a lifelong struggle. <br />
So I feel for things that don't quite come up to scratch. This monumental, circular bed has only ivy growing in it when so much more could have been achieved with it. Yet it's comfortable the way it is, not needing a 'makeover'. <br />
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It's meant to be autumn here, but it's increasingly feeling that autumn is the new spring. I'm sitting here in a light dressing-gown, the window open, the 20 degree temperature about the same as it has been throughout the day, though it's nearly 7pm. Having just read that Australia is likely to suffer another <i>el Nino</i> year - when increased warmth from up out of the Pacific Ocean circulates then an oscillating heat wave that eliminates rain - I am feeling the fizz evaporate.<br />
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These photos, as I wandered away from my physiotherapy, were taken on my mobile, but the blurring may well be germane. We're meant to be upside down here, in the southern hemisphere, but our upside down-ness is itself flipping upside down. Things are, in the streetscape, in the gardens, looking remarkably well, after a savage summer, but will we be able to anchor ourselves in an environment that seems as if it's being eliminated?<br />
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The exercises my physiotherapist has given me are doing something fine...I am feeling somehow more vertical. I know I can stand up to whatever it is I must. Can the gardens of Melbourne do the same? <br />
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This isn't <i>pleaching,</i> is it, when older branches have been bent into a form to hold the effusion of new growth? Dunno. I'm just hoping that bits of garden history like this live indefinitely here or we'll be getting gardens made out of concrete slabs with bits of green plastic tossed over hem, <i>to look as if they were a real garden. </i><br />
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God knows I need my physiotherapist. There will no doubt be an even more awful summer than the one we just had, but I will not be able to lug wheelbarrow-load after wheelbarrow-load of mulch over the outline of my garden unless there's some sort of body filling out the outline. Like, I don't do things without a reason.<br />
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My mother's nickname for me as a boy was <i>Knuckleduster. </i>Can you believe it? As if I'm meant to stand up to all this dessication without blinking! You need some sort of results sometimes, out of this life, or else it gets to be a bit of a play within a play. Declaration: <i>Gardener Needs Help. </i><br />
( PS I got some help today in the form of a new job in a bookshop ).<i> </i>Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-78840114968522071112014-05-10T04:27:00.000-07:002014-05-10T04:27:17.676-07:00The Parliament, the Princess and the Pedestrian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You can live in a city all your life, as I've done in Melbourne, and be familiar only with parts of it. Parts such as the eastern, Parliamentary end of the CBD, to which I frequently gravitate.<br />
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Having traversed and photographed this area often I didn't know I'd be able to find anything new today. Above and below are views from out of the inside of Parliament Station.<br />
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Above, the Stanford Fountain in Gordon Square, created by William Stanford 1867-1870 while in prison for horse theft and escaping custody. Perhaps he was tired of walking. Perhaps he just wanted to run. He did, though, earn his freedom, I feel.<br />
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I wasn't prepared to risk arrest by entering this untended gate into Parliament House and be horse-whipped or brought before a jury. The gardens are open only one day a year and today wasn't the day.<br />
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The Station itself is all underground, and a show-piece when it was built. Its gardens are looking a bit down and out, greying, like the day...<br />
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...but retaining some suitable splendour. <br />
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There was a Princess here somewhere, wasn't there? This is her, or at least the side of her, the Princess Theatre, where this pedestrian for a time in his younger days ushered in the crowds and even got to see Lauren Bacall on stage. <br />
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But today I was ushering myself down Little Bourke Street to lunch, glimpsing the past as I went, relieved to see some green amid the prison-grey. Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-51085397921003460582014-05-02T04:40:00.000-07:002014-05-02T04:40:35.860-07:00Dragonfly Arise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-35481741240841645472014-04-14T20:27:00.000-07:002014-04-14T20:29:46.308-07:00At Royal Park<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Good to know, but Zara wasn't with me. <br />
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Much of Royal Park's 180 hectares just north of the city centre look like this, a broad sweep of landscape largely native. And wonderful to roam or fly kites in. <br />
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On one side is the elegant university precinct of Parkville, almost entirely intact.<br />
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And in the corner abutting Flemington Road the new Royal Children's Hospital has bitten off a wedge.<br />
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It was sad to see so many giants felled, but for the children obliged to be hospitalized here, the outlook couldn't be better.<br />
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Such a vast space it is. I used to come through here often, about 25 years ago, when it was much more left to its own devices.<br />
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There's a great deal of native bird-life and many superb plants such as this Eucalypt.<br />
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And this native Hibiscus.<br />
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First set aside by Governor Charles La Trobe in 1845, there are ancient trees here such as this Peppercorn.<br />
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I don't know who gets to live in the Gatehouse above, but it'd be a nice kind of corner of the world.<br />
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This is the sort of tree I love most, an old, gnarled Eucalypt, seeming to thrust its branches into the sky.<br />
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Some of them have been here since before white settlement and before tram tracks were invented.<br />
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I'm still trying to work out what this specimen is, with its sausage-like seed pods, one of which I have with me.<br />
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However tough our natives are, many exhibit an almost effervescent delicacy.<br />
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So stroll-able it is, without the hordes you sometimes find in botanic gardens.<br />
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I can't pretend that I find the new architecture complementary to its surroundings, but the view is to live for... Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-33096186104725338762014-04-05T02:32:00.000-07:002014-04-05T02:32:25.027-07:00Shaking the Ghosts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Though autumn's a time of dying, here where summer's been torturous, it comes as an agent of revival.<br />
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This being the Antipodes - where practice is sort of upside down - many native plants come into flower and magpies start to breed. Autumn comes as if it were spring. Our springs are not so much a re-birth as a riot. <br />
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So for the human gardener there's running around to be done, the clock of coldness beginning to tick. Above is the beginning of a new <i>procession </i>along a wall too hot and exposed to have been dealt with in summer.<br />
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And here a bit of a jumble...good to see because there's only been dessication and a sort of hard-held forbearance till this easing has come.<br />
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Aspidistras - which I shall keep flying - are one of my favourite plants, and it's now they seem to wake up - and wake up their neighbourhood.<br />
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There's a feeling of relief for me that so many things have survived and have now seemed to have got back their <i>zoomph.</i><br />
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This above is the beginning of what will be filled with foliage. Makeshift, sparse, reduced; soon, as the glowing, glaring days grow shorter, life will re-colonise.<br />
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I salute this land made to be barren, then made to go forth to multiply.<br />
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For <i>out of nothing </i>life comes.<br />
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-9376574249727830472014-03-26T01:44:00.000-07:002014-03-26T01:44:22.331-07:00and three little kookaburras<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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At last! The kookaburras have landed!<br />
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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.<br />
The one squatting is the young one.<br />
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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 <i>restauranteur </i>is part of that. <br />
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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... <br />
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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. <br />
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<br />Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6079722435186265697.post-47260136295129577422014-03-10T20:19:00.001-07:002014-03-11T01:38:07.130-07:00Glimpses of Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Whatever changes are happening to the world's climates, the only certainty is their unpredictability.<br />
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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...<br />
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the hardiest, most prevailing, most persistent plants struggle now to deal with rainlessness. <br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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 - <br />
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and these residents may have forgotten to clip their sprouting <i>Muehlenbeckia</i> columns, but they look so much better for it. And they've survived.<br />
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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...<br />
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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.<br />
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There are those who can afford to re-create sanctuary and in such sanctuary life continues unchallenged.<br />
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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.<br />
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There's the ever-marvelous city-scape, able to inoculate itself against all pressure, for now, with its tiny wave towards the green.<br />
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There's the bastion, the little bit of the past that never says die.<br />
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And there's the Vespa I'd rather ride on, out of here, to a country that doesn't know of drought...Gardener in the Distancehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14478393904059307841noreply@blogger.com10