Colourful Cosmos

As I wander the garden now, in the last throes of a very hot Summer month, the cosmos plants are blooming happily. They have such simple, cheerful flowers! Their colourful blooms sit atop long stems that bend and sway in the breeze above a mass of bright-green ferny foliage.  When those blooms are spent, and the seeds form, they disperse on those breezes and self sow around the garden. So that, the next time the warmer months roll around, you'll have even more cosmos to brighten up your garden.

light pink

white

dark pink

Our little native bees seem to love cosmos as much as I do.  Dozens of them spend time every morning among the flowers happily plundering their pollen. I am happy just to watch their busy efforts  and to delight in the bright bursts of colour that are the cosmos flowers in my Summer garden. 

Happy Monday!

Meg

Rich beyond Measure

Sometimes, I feel rich beyond measure. Rich, not in terms of our bank balance (which no-one in their right mind would call rich), but in terms of the people, my family and my friends, who enrich and influence my life. 

Well over twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to meet one such friend and a few nights ago we shared a dinner together. She is wise, this old friend of mine. Her heart is profoundly good and beautiful and, in being so, she lifts my heart and my spirit. 

As we often do, when we get the rare opportunity to catch up with one another, we spoil one another with little gifts we have found that we know the other will love. We get as much joy from making and sourcing these offerings as we do from the giving. From our dinner, I not only brought home a feeling of profound gratitude that this outstanding human being is my friend, but a few treasures that I will hold and use and that will remind me of her generosity and kindness. 

 A hand-built tiny ceramic terrine and a beautiful blue bird brooch.

Handmade and beautiful.

A sweet stitched dove and a new notebook.

I hope that you are blessed too with nurturing and supportive friendships in your life. I feel sure that it is such close relationships that are a true measure of wealth.

Meg

p.s. Have a lovely weekend. Perhaps you'll have the chance up with an old friend too.

Old fashioned milk

I spent the very early years of my life in a dairy farming region far to the north of where I live now. My memories are of rolling green hills, dirt roads, picking native raspberries with my cousins, the creek at the bottom of a steeply sloping paddock and, of course, cows!

We lived up the road from my aunt and uncle. They had a dairy which is long gone now even though they still live in the same house on the same land. My family didn't have a dairy but we did have a house cow, a black and white fressian, named Maggie. Although I don't remember milking her with my mother, I do remember the thick layer of cream that could be skimmed off with a spoon and the most delicious ice-cream that my mother made and set in battered old cake tins. I have a memory of the taste of that ice-cream but, as much as I try, I can't replicate it! No recipe for it can be found in any of my mother's well-used, splattered cookbooks and she can't remember how she did it either because she stopped making it when we left the area and no longer had a house cow.

I was thinking about all this the other day when I bought some milk. I am fussy about milk, a legacy of my early childhood no doubt. And not long ago, at a little bakery not far from where I live, I found some lovely full-cream, unhomogenised milk in glass bottles. Old-fashioned milk!

I bought two bottles of this milk, produced less than two hours away from the city where I live, and found it to be delicious and creamy! I love that it's available in glass bottles as well as the standard plastic milk bottle though they can't be collected, sterilised and reused as yet but they can be recycled. I thoroughly washed both of the bottles I bought and they are now in our fridge holding chilled water.

I haven't attempted to make ice-cream with this milk yet but I will soon. I wonder if it will bring me any closer to that taste of the long-ago ice-cream my mother used to make for us. I might also try setting my next batch of ice-cream in a battered, heart-shaped cake tin as that might help too!

Meg