Michael Ward | Creative
Michael Ward 
The North Esk River flows into the Tamar River via Cataract Gorge. The North Esk is a massive drain for a huge area of land that runs from the Western Tiers (the Great Western Mountains) to the City of Launceston in Tasmania. It is prone to flooding in fact the place where I stood to make this photo is now under three metres of water after only a few days of rain.
Osteospermums are a wonderful group of mostly South African flowering small shrubs that produce huge numbers of flowers over a period of as long as five months in the right conditions. There are dozens of varieties available in a huge range of colours. All they seem to need is a bit of blood and bone once a year followed by a dose of GoGo juice or any seaweed wetting agent. I water mine every two to three weeks and then clip back at the end of the flowering season. The main reason why I like these lovely plants is that the marsupials that call my garden home don’t eat them!
Saffron (Crocus sativus) is bulb. The dried thread-like parts of the flower (stigmas) are used to make saffron spice, food coloring, and medicine. Saffron contains chemicals that might alter mood, kill cancer cells, decrease swelling, and act like antioxidants.
The Wandoo forest is located between Chidlow in the Darling Ranges and York in Western Australia. It’s a special place where these magnificent beige bark eucalyptus trees (Eucalyptus wandoo) grow the canopy is more open and the trees smaller than the Jarrah forests thirty km to the west. The understory plants on the forest floor are also different with many other species plants to that of the Jarrah forest here there is less rain, the earth is dry and new growth ceases until the next rain.
A reason for it all. This is the third blog I have authored under this, my original URL. The first began back in 2001 and grew out of my first website created in Claris Homepage and Page Mill from 1990. It began in a much tinkered with HTML way. It ran for twelve years with almost 3000 posts… Over the course of that period it evolved into a wonderful “modern” hand coded CMS program written by a friend of my daughter. This morphed into a WordPress site in 2007/8. After a hiatus of ten years due to a trans continental move, a few health issues and the creation of a new garden I now have the time and inclination to photograph, draw and paint my way through what is realistically the last phase of my life. TBC…