I grew this gardenia and I was amazed – AMAZED - when it gave me flowery smelly goodness.
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Fleeting Gardenia
2010 Round Up
2010 was an absolute corker of a year. This garden malarkey sunk it’s teeth in with a vengeance and quite suddenly I was looking at the world with new eyes. I fell off a motorbike and got married in a Lahu hilltribe ceremony, I fell off a step and discovered Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I got a new job and found a new career. And I grew loads of plants, battled snails and weeds, contended with Mother Nature’s temper tantrums, experimented madly, got things badly wrong and occasionally got them right.
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Gratuitous Sunflower Shot
Because I love them and they’re starting to look like lions!
The Sunflower Advocacy
I came home from work today feeling a little bit hot, a little bit cranky, a little bit looking forward to a glass of New Zealand’s finest grape juice for big kids – I pulled up in a cloud of dust (I don’t know why, but the little car really likes to skid to a stop) and hauled out my grown up handbag (honestly, it’s bigger than the bag I take with me when Crazy Car Man and I travel – how I can get through months on the road with my worldly possessions stuffed into a 30 litre day pack and yet feel the need to carry enough luggage for a family of five with me when I go to the office is completely beyond me). I was, to be perfectly frank, in a mood.
And then I saw this….
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Green Things Robbed From Carmen Miranda’s Garden
We went to a One Hundred Years party last weekend. Longevity runs in the family, I’ve seen how I’m going to look at 97 (a little wrinkly, a little hunched, a little deaf, but with full control of my bladder and all marbles accounted for), but this one was not for just one person. My Aunty was celebrating her 60th and my cousin had hit the big four oh, and in true mad relly style it had to be celebrated with a fancy dress knees up.
The party was held at their local RSL club in a real country town and I feel a few unsuspecting farmers got the shock of their life to find themselves standing at the bar next to the Grim Reaper, or a crocodile, or a Whoopie cushion (a weird costume but a great one if you have a predilection for being poked in the stomach, or alternatively are talented at farting on cue – my uncle can do both, at the same time…..he’s ruined the excuse of not being able to multi-task for all of the male species).
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The Great Winter Tomato Hoax
There is nothing better than a cheese and tomato sandwich, on really fresh bread, with salt and pepper. Even just writing about it makes me crave one.
Crazy Car Man doesn’t agree. In his opinion, until very very recently, the only thing a tomato was good for was making tomato sauce. And he has a point – in the shops, tomatoes are crap. In fact, in his opinion, tomatoes come in a close second to his most hated fruit, known as The Fruit of the Devil (seriously, he says it in capital letters), the dreaded pineapple.
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Question for the Collective: Deadheading
What I know about growing flowers could fill half a thimble, and that’s being generous….in all honesty, it’s probably more like the drops that are left in the bottom of a thimble when you fill it up with water and then pour it out, give it a good shake and then set it upright again.
Not much.
And so I call on the wisdom of the cyberverse, and all you legends who pop into Crazy Garden Ladyland on occasion, for advice on what to do with my flowers.
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When The Wind Blows
I woke up this morning in the most horrible temper. I’d been kept awake most of the night by the howling of the wind, which put me firmly on the wrong side when I swung myself out of bed.
I hate the wind. A frisky breeze can be a most pleasant thing, but when it goes from fluttering the tendrils of my hair to blinding me with said hair and bombarding my blind self with the howling of a thousand ghouls, it’s no longer a pleasant experience and is more akin to fingernails being dragged down a chalkboard.
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Nightmare Bloom
I’m having nightmares after seeing this plant. I think it looks like it would take a chunk out of you as you walk past.
I’m getting strong visuals of some unsuspecting person leaning in to smell it, and losing their nose.
Garden Kitsch Vertigo
I have a confession to make – the most amazing source of visual pleasure in my garden right now is my rusty wheelbarrow full of colourful flowers. It freaks me out slightly to say that because a wheelbarrow of flowers is up there in the highest echelons of garden kitsch. I’ve always had garden kitsch vertigo. Wishing wells, model trains, giant fake boots, gnomes and wheelbarrows have always given me a minor case of the horrors. Even giant concrete fly agarics (unless accompanied by Smurfs……) make me recoil.
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