I promised, posts ago, a lighter post, and work deadlines are ‘stressed’ at the moment, so, some outdoor aesthetics that make a life lived better.
This is impressionist painter, and flowery braggart, Oscar-Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) painting of his garden with his family in it:
This is a painting by Mr. Monet of his water lily pond; the most painted water lily pond there ever was or will ever be (probably):
This is a painting that Google-Image says is a painting by Mr.Monet of his garden, but I’m not so sure, and haven’t the time to authenticate the claim. I’ve included it because I like the brighter casting of it:
This is Mr. Monet painting in Mr. Monet’s garden as painted by fellow impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919):
There are no copyright issues for Mr. Renoir painting Mr. Monet in Mr. Monet’s garden, but there may well be copyright issues with me reproducing all these paintings here; if so this is why I think that silly.
This is Mr. Monet’s inevitable artist’s self-portrait painted in 1885 – I explain here why this is inevitable:
This is a photo of my vegetable garden under construction in the Mahau Sound. It’s going to be two waist high raised vegetable clotches, plus a glass house raised to waist height (because why bend over if you don’t have to). There’s the possibility of planting some berries in the spare land in the foreground – raspberries I think. I may have to build – correction, I may have to pay some other person to build a prison of wire and steel poles around and above the garden to keep rabbits and possums out – I’m going to run it for a season without and see:
A friend on Twitter tweeted I should line the bottom of the clotches with the bodies of possums. It’s a very good fertological idea, and yes, a possum is a pest, no denying it, but I’m stupid, well, soft enough to think those cute wee possums with their little pink noses have a right to live, or if not ‘right’, exactly, I don’t care, I won’t be killing them: I prefer to corral them off to someone else’s garden. (It’s a copout in the form of a compromise my neighbours won’t know about because they don’t – to my knowledge – read this blog.)
This Internet site, GardenGrow, will be my planting guide for all things vegetable and herb: it’s the best site of its type I’ve seen; you may want to bookmark it.
This is my favourite gardening blog, Tikorangi the Jury Garden, penned by Abbie Jury, following her and husband Mark’s green fingers in their rare – for New Zealand –private intergenerational garden. They are also into meadows that are in part wild, and this is a fine thing. I’m going to visit their garden one day; I don’t know when.
Are you ready? More water lilies, not Mr. Monet, but American contemporary Graham Gercken …
[The feature painting is Monet’s Irises.]
Press on Daisy Dog in the header to go back to menu of all my posts …
Books, Films & Art, Plus a Bit of Life I've Squeezed In. 
Lovely, lovely ,lovely, Mark … I’m also a fan of Monet’s yellow kitchen too – no gadgets, even for his day ! – but gorgeous….
Love your vegetable boxes, the highest I’ve ever seen – brilliant idea, because you can get so much rich soil in them, apart from no bending… agree with you on the possums.. they didn’t ask to come here… we live in a QE11 covenanted forest, where conservation is based on exterminating rats, possums and stoats…
I find this really heard, as the stoats do eat the birds, even the blackbirds, and the rats eat the quail’s eggs in the nests , etc.
I have a mystical, esoteric method which people would think daft, but a la Findhorn, I speak to the devas of each species,( there is a method) and point out that our house and land is our space, and could they tell their creatures to find a more appropriate place for them to live. please…. so we don’t seem to get any rats, possums etc in our place….
it’s such a difficult choice, and I feel we are passing the buck !!!! but there are plenty of other enthusiastic trappers out there ….
ET – yes… but too painful to re-visit his anguished request …’ ET – call home’ … haunted by it ever since !
And the suspicion and narrow minds of those who are afraid of the new and challenging were so real in that film too… just rambling… and sounding madder and madder with each sentence, I suspect !!!!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hah!
Re the possums it is a copout, but it’s the same disjunct I have with food: I eat meat (love food) yet don’t like the way we farm meat, and abattoirs are repulsive. I simply don’t choose to involve myself in the messiness: no killing for me. [And no guns in my house – got that one from Dad.] Some contradictions I can live with (or perhaps I’ll sort them out and get a bit more ethical down the track). I’ve always liked Flaubert’s ‘contradiction is what keeps sanity in place’ … if you thought about those abattoirs in that would lie insanity, definitely.
Bit suspect of your mystical method 🙂 Does it work?
And I bet you’re lucky enough to have visited Monet’s garden (by the sound of it?)
LikeLike
Yes, after watching the cattle trucks trundling off to the ‘Works,’ I was a vegetarian for years, until I found I was low on amino acids, and began eating chicken ( organic – as in eggs too ) Have you read: ‘ My year of meat’? brilliant, funny, tragic by Ruth Ozeki – a killer too !!!!
I can only speak from my experience over my ‘mystical method’… before we moved here, I used to feed about a hundred sparrows, plus other varieties, and worried that when I left, they would be in trouble and keep looking for the food. So I did my trick on Sunday night asking that they got the message. I got up the next morning dreading to see all the little rascals barracking me in the plum tree as usual, but there wasn’t a one – actually two lonely ones, and they never came back in the remaining two months I lived there…
Before then, they even recognised my white car and would be waiting at the end of the road until I came home, and then fly from telegraph pole to telegraph pole all the way to my garage. They’d sit there until I came out the side door, and then fly down to the kitchen door and arrange themselves outside on the plum tree, shouting at me for their afternoon tea the whole time.
No, alas, I haven’t visited Monet’s garden – but have pored over the pics, like everyone else !!!
I like Flaubert’s remark… will keep me going while I continue to try to iron out all my inconsistencies.
Do love your blog and its ideas… find it really stimulating
LikeLiked by 1 person