It's just past the equinox and every day more and more flowers are starting to appear...first the jonquils, daffodils, magnolias, freesias, hellebores, kowhai, gladioli, then the dutch iris, lavenders, echium, babiana, pelargonium, pansies, camellia, more polyanthus, azalea, geranium, peach and apricot blossom, rosemary, forget-me-nots, gazania, grape muscari, bluebells, nasturtium, oxalis (?!), marguerite daisy...
School has also started on their spring garden journey, with the juniors growing Little Gardens (courtesy of New World) and the teachers buying up those expensive Vegepods with their teacher's discount. I heard that they are going to clean up the school kitchen garden that had become overgrown with woolly nightshade. I've been giving away plenty of seeds to keen child gardeners, and they are quite interested in watering the library indoor plants. I had one boy ask if they were real - he thought they were plastic?!
I do miss Rose the gardener but she'll be pleased to know that the children are getting stuck in and it was all their idea - they are doing it for their inquiry topic, which has morphed into looking after 'Our place, Our people'
Perhaps we'll have a Garden to Table program yet? Maybe they can grow their own pizza toppings? They have been having carrots nearly every single day for school lunch. I expect their eyesight will be super and who ever said the carrot and stick approach does not work has not ever worked in my school.
On Monday there will be a public holiday as a memorial to our late Queen Elizabeth II. Her Majesty apparently was fond of gardens and wildlife and that is where her son Charles got his green fingers from, wandering around the palace parks and gardens as a little boy. Well now Charles is King we may expect a much greater focus on greening our planet before it's too late. So I can't say it's a terrible thing to have a garden lover ruling the nations - not the extravagant show gardens of Versailles but on a much more wildlife friendly scale. And the Royal Garden parties may actually become more about the gardens themselves than people dressed up in their finery and strolling about manicured lawns.
If King Charles III does visit New Zealand again he might want to spend some more time getting close to nature in our forests and organic gardens, and planting trees, I'm sure it will be more his preference than promenading around towns and cities in his latest outfits in a motor cade opening yet another air conditioned building.
However I can only speculate what the next few decades will bring. We don't really need his head on our money since everyone now uses EFTPOS and internet banking anyway. If we do become a republic, which who knows, could happen, we might miss someone who seems to truly care about the environment and the air we breathe. On Friday many people went on strike to protest the lack of action - and no it isn't all about 'climate change' as some politically correct term is now calling it. It's about calling the environmental offenders/polluters to account - and it is Big Business and their profits that is the main driving force behind it.
I could say much more but with local elections coming up I'm concerned that our dear Eco City was only a mirage and it will instead become an unbreathable concrete jungle like every other congested city on this planet.
