Month: July 2024

A once grand home in Invermay…

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A grand home in Invermay has had a once equally grand garden chopped off in pursuit of progress. Our planning regulations seem to be something of a nonsense when this kind of planning is enacted. This is not planning this is an ill thought out wrecking ball of a solution to the housing crisis. This is divide and profit leaving the area with a miss mash of private spaces with no thought given to community or street scape aesthetics for the common good. With good planning this old elegant home could have been incorporated with new buildings, planed private and shared space to form an appreciation of our heritage for now and attractive places for the future. Instead what we have is the realestate equivalent of our mining activities ‘dig it up and ship it out’

Through the Scotch pines…

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Tasmania’s climate and soils are such that they can with a bit of care support plants from the sub polar to the sub tropical so its no surprise that the first migrants brought with them the plants that were part of their diet or part of their cultural heritage. Trees have for many been part and parcel of both, those they need to use, like to look at or eat the fruit from. As a result the Cataract Gorge being a park both botanical and recreational has many of those trees that were familiar to the first settlers from their former homelands and those they passed through on the way to this their new home. Most of the parks and open land in Launceston illustrate this occurrence with the huge variety of species purposely planted. We are still fortunate to have this legacy, however the pressure and the need for more residential homes is threatening so many of these magnificent and in some cases rare species of trees…

A foggy morning in the First Basin

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A foggy morn in the first basin of the north esk river Launceston Tasmania

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… Marsupials don’t eat them!

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Osteospermums the one flower that our marsupial friends won't eat!

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!

Wandoo Forest

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Wandoo Forest Western Australia

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…