Gardening – The People & Environment Blog

16 June 2016

A prickly invasion

The act of nurturing a single pot plant would appear to be a fairly benign activity. However, when Navy surgeon, Dr William Bell Carlyle, entrusted a prickly pear cutting to the care and protection of his servant, Mary Sutton, no one could have predicted the devastation which would result. In a period of less than 100 years the prickly pear multiplied and occupied over 60 million acres of Queensland and New South...

Agriculture/Gardening/Landscapes/Science/Uncategorised

12 March 2014

Worms on the roof

Yesterday I visited MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, on the banks of the Derwent River in Hobart, to meet with Reuben Parker-Greer. Reuben is employed by MONA to manage an inspiring initiative that helps local schools develop and maintain kitchen garden projects. MONA sits on the edge of a long established industrial and residential area, where fast-food outlets well outnumber community and school gardens. Moonah Primary School is one of...

Climate change/Gardening

13 February 2014

Food Stories — objects and resilience

It’s been a brutal Australian summer. Record temperatures, unprecedented heatwaves, fires. Those people who draw their living from the land, and the livestock and crops they tend, have suffered most. In the years to come, as the chaotic ecological effects of global warming and climate change intensify, one of our greatest challenges will be to ensure the

Climate change/Food/Gardening

30 January 2014

Celebrating Year of the Horse

With Chinese New Year celebrations now underway around the world, 2014 is a year to consider the beauty and power of the horse. As 2014 is the year of the Wooden Horse, it is particularly poignant for the Horses in Australia project team at the National Museum, and a good time to reflect on a few horse stories in the Museum’s collections.

Gardening/Horses/Landscapes

14 January 2014

Self portraits – in bees

Yesterday a fellow curator alerted me to a sign that she’d driven past that morning in the Australian National University, ‘CAUTION: Bees in Lavender’. Today on the way to work I stopped to have a look. University staff had erected no less than five warning signs beside the buzzing, fragrant swathe of blossoming lavender. I started keeping bees

Food/Gardening

28 October 2013

The Newest (Oldest?) Garden in Canberra

It was an eerie, smoky morning on Sunday the 20th of October, 2013. With the smell of the New South Wales bushfires in the air, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher formally opened the first stage of the National Rock Garden as part of the celebrations of the Centenary of Canberra. This was oddly appropriate, as it was the 2003 Canberra fires that opened up this space for the National Rock Garden...

Gardening/Landscapes

25 September 2013

Everybody had an ‘Aunty Ivy’

…or an Aunty Hilda or an Aunty Edna. There is something very familiar and comforting about ‘Aunty Ivy’. The character was introduced to the ‘Life. Be in it.’ public health campaign in the late 1980s, as a contrast to couch potato, ‘Norm’, who spent his days watching television. ‘Aunty Ivy’ was energetic and encouraged people to get out into the garden, enjoy the fresh air and, without even realising it,...

Gardening

Category: Gardening