Recently, Petra Manos posted a photo on an Australian birds FB group I belong to. It completely enchanted the members (including me), especially when Petra shared the story behind her artwork. She generously agreed to write this guest post. PETRA’S STORY I started in August 2020, when
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So this year I made the difficult decision not to send Christmas cards, especially to people I already interact with regularly such as close friends, neighbours and my social media connections. I have been intending to do this for a while, but in the past my resolve
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Persicaria is surely among the most under-rated of plants. Here in the Blue Mountains they do very well and require very little attention. Mind you, bees and other insects adore the tiny flowers. Some of the small, immature leaves at the bottom of the stems are quite
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When my husband Rob and I were living in England we used to buy boxes of special fudge, made by The Toffee Shop at Penrith, in the Lake District. We actually bought it at Fortnum and Mason in London. It was packaged for a charity The Princes
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While researching my Tasmanian family history I discovered that my great-uncle Arthur’s daughter Winifred (Winnie) Singleton died in 1937 at Victoria’s Sunbury Asylum, aged 19. I also came across a sad story that she had been admitted after attacking her mother with a knife. Winnie and her
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In 1938 the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury published the following, circa 1840s portrait of Mr John Osborne, one of the State’s pioneering horticulturalists. It’s impossible to make out from the reproduction, but he is holding….a pineapple! Osborne was born in Staffordshire England, on Christmas Day 1804. He
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I so love picking flowers in my Blackheath garden, but I rather regret gathering native dianella from the woodland areas. It looks so much better ‘en place’. The name of course derives from Diana, goddess of the woods. Its tiny blue flowers are quite complex, with their
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This is a short guest post from my New England friend Jeanne Verity. She writes so beautifully about the United States I dreamed of as a child in 1950’s Tasmania. Aah, America, here was a place where autumn was ‘fall’ and where ripening pumpkins heralded Halloween, a
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The Camellia japonica R.T. Wheeler is very hardy and produces enormous, variegated blooms. I have picked so many to fill various containers So why on earth would I want to banish it? Well, in my Blackheath garden the camellia was growing between two red blooming trees, just
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When it was announced that there was to be a new cafe in the Collier Arcade at Blackheath my associate Editor Des and I were very excited. We love to do a little writing over a working lunch. It’s a lot quieter in the arcade than out
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