Mother Earth’s Garden

March 9th, 2007

World’s Largest Flower Finds a Home!

I just read an article in Smithsonian magazine that the world’s largest flower has recently, finally been classified into a family name. Here’s an excerpt:

The world’s largest flower, indigenous to Indonesia, has finally found a home on the tree of life. Reeking of rotting flesh, Rofflesia arnoldii has no leaves, stems or roots- […]

By Rebecca -- 0 comments

March 9th, 2007

Environment in Politics.

Recently Al Gore worked on a movie project, An Inconvenient Truth. I highly recommend you watch this video, just for information sake, though I’m a little frustrated by politics getting involved. Some say that the democratic party does more to save the environment, while other bash the republicans. The truth of the […]

By Rebecca -- 0 comments

February 2nd, 2007

Organic gardening and global warming

After my post the other day about greenhouse gases and Voltaire, a friend alerted me to this site, which is all about the positive contribution organic gardens make to the problem.
“When David and his wife Judy started gardening about 10 years ago, their soil tested just one percent organic matter. Now it tests 7.7 percent […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

January 30th, 2007

Voltaire and hope in the garden

A very depressing report in today’s newspapers about a new report on global warming predicting all sorts of terrible things. It makes me feel so helpless, and also as though I should be doing more…
We already:
Save water in every way we can, watering the garden entirely from grey washing machine water and other drips
Are signed […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

January 17th, 2007

Gertrude gets cross

I met Gertrude, the matriach of the community gardens, yesterday on my morning walk, and commented to her how hard it is to keep the vegetable patch alive on two waterings a week. She put her head on one side (her little dog, who always follows her, did likewise) fixed me with a stare and […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

January 16th, 2007

Drought

Imagine how the country will look by the end of summer. Frankly I can’t. It is already so grizzled, and we are only at the beginning of the journey that will take us, eventually, to rain and normality. If it can ever be normal again.
Even the native trees - big eucalypts that have surely survived […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

January 1st, 2007

Saving water

Happy new year’s day everyone, but for gardeners in Melbourne today is a sad occassion. Our city’s water supplies have dropped so low that Stage Three Water Restrictions are necessary, this means, among other things, that we can only water our gardens with tap water twice a week, with the days determined by our house […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

December 27th, 2006

Blessed rain

It’s hard to believe that a few days ago Melbourne was shrouded in smoke from the bushfires burning all round the city, and that it seemed as though it would never rain again. For weeks now our parks and gardens have been brown and dessicated. Even the eucalypt trees are showing signs of water stress […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

December 16th, 2006

How I became a gardener

How does one become a gardener? I should say at the outset that although I harbor a strong and mostly secret belief that gardening is what life is really all about, I am not a real gardener. I cannot tell you the common names of many plants, let alone their botanical names. My garden is […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments

December 12th, 2006

Peter Timms - good books

Just a quick post to recommend two books by Peter Timms, a wise and wonderful gardener who writes lovely witty prose. He now lives in Tasmania, but used to live in Victoria, where he wreote his first gardening book “Making Nature”. You can read an extract here (http://www.austlit.com/chapters/timms-origins.html)
The book that has prompted me to write […]

By Margaret -- 0 comments