Garden Bloggers

I’m fairly new to garden blogging – and this has grown out of my passion for gardening and garden photography. It’s a great way to showcase my photos and my passion.

Today, however, I want to tell you about some other garden bloggers whose sites I absolutely love. It’s no secret that the UK is the garden empire – at least I think it is, so there’s no surprise when some of those blogs are from the UK. They also have a fantastic garden photography industry there – something I’d like to see here too. I belong to a Garden Bloggers group on Facebook and most members are in the UK, so I guess we all get to learn something there, as well as what I share for our location. Don’t know if I’m the only Aussie in the group – haven’t met any others yet.

My absolute visual favourite is The Mindful Gardener by Alison Battye. Her subtitle is “The sensory pleasures and earthy delights of gardening” and her site is certainly that. If you’ve never seen it before, I urge you to pay it a visit and read and just absorb the visuals. I love the design so much I’m tempted to change mine! 🙂

Another is the Chatty Gardener by Mandy Bradshaw. Great articles and images. I need to find more time to write to my own! I always have lots of images, just not as much time for writing as I’d like. Trying to make sure I put aside Fridays for it now. I love that I can learn from other bloggers like Mandy.

Gardening by Design by Alison Marsden is another great read. Lots of hints and tips and advice re planning and designing your garden and being soil aware.

And it’s always interested to read what is being planted, and when, on the other side of the planet, as Kevin W Gelder does on his latest post. I encourage you to go and have a read.

I do have other blogs I like too, Australian ones, and they are linked in the side menu of this blog for you to view and visit.

If you, like me, have been despairing of a long dry summer (as it has been in Victoria and other parts of our country) then seeing and reading about the English gardens can possibly help you feel better – or perhaps, at least, put you into a ‘fantasy world’ for a period of time where you can dream about what you’d like to do for your garden, before coming back to reality. For me, I am so hankering for some decent rain – not a deluge where the ground doesn’t get to take it in and things get washed away, but some decent soaking, long and gentle rains over a few weeks. We so badly need it. Our water tanks are low (we live entirely on tank water – no mains where we are) and we’ve had to make decisions, sadly, on what to maintain, and what not to. Our concerns are if we do get water brought in, how much chlorine might be in it and if we get heavy rains later, how much of that would wash into our billabong from overflow. We do not want to kill off our fish or the eco system that is now well developed there. Our bush paddock garden is still young so needs to be nursed and we’ve lost some young plants but others are surviving, with little water, which is good. The plan is to establish as much as we can that requires little water, once established – it’s just getting them through the first summer that’s so important.

However, we do have other things coping. Was very surprised to see the Bella Donna Lilies show up already. And the Lotus plant is flourishing in the billabong – clearly the conditions for it are right, which is great to see!