Milton Keynes is about two and half miles away, as the quetzal flies.

Evergreen conifers. No, wait - come back! These are pretty interesting ones. These are species that were around at the dawn on time. Ones that dinosaurs would graze on, before getting stomach ache, presumably.

Winter is a pretty boring time in most people's gardens. All the Delphiniums and Dahlias that looked so nice in the summer, have shrivelled to a rotting mess. This is the reason why I've concentrated my efforts on plants that look good all-year-round.

I started off with palms and yuccas, then succulents and ferns. The list goes on. I suppose I first became interested in these ancient conifers after having see huge Monkey Puzzle trees growing in public and private gardens. Those weird sort of plants appeal to me.

I bought my Monkey Puzzle (Araucaria araucana pictured above) several years ago. It's actually grown quite a bit since I bought it. The little plant in the same pot is Ruscus aculeatus 'John Redmond', which holds on to red berries through the winter.

The tall conifer in the picture is the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis), rediscovered in the 1990's in Australia after having been thought to be extinct for millions of years. I have been reading the progress of Julia's Wollemi Pine on her great blog We're Going to Need a Bigger Pot. In a similar manner to Julia, I am naming my plant, Wollemina.

Another ancient Australian conifer is Araucaria bidwillii. This is my one below. The last two winters have been hard on it, but has so far survived happily outdoors. A friend bought it back from Australia in 2003, and it has been outside ever since. The native Australians used to eat the 'Bunya Pine' seeds as they fell. The cone bearing the seeds is especially large, and people are advised against walking under these trees in years of heavy coning.

                                  

The problem with these amazing trees, is that they grow up into very big plants. Oh well, I hope to have a bigger garden to accomodate them!

Now for something completely different, Pseudowintera colorata;

                                        

One must defeat the evil gnomes in order to save the golden duckling.

Firstly, apologies to any gnomes reading. I realise there are both good and bad gnomes. This is Cyclamen coum, which has just started flowering under my apple tree.

Several weeks ago, I was reading the blog of the lovely Di. Here's the post on comment moderation. You might have a blog that doesn't have any comment moderation set up. I would urge you to follow the instructions on Di's blog post.
My spammers seem particularly keen on this post; Giant Redwood for whatever reason. I found the comments quite amusing.


Have a row of shots ready, and when you read 'Harare'... DRINK!


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I shall be disappointed if any of my readers are still standing after my drinking game.

After installing comment moderation, and my reason for looking back at my Redwood post, I recently had another suspicious comment.


"Let me assure you this is a beautiful picture but Africa is full of lot more beauty than shown in this picture. However, seeing is believing is definitely not wrong. I have been to Africa in my child hood. I have witnessed the precise craftsmanship of God. Words can't describe what god has done on the land of Africa. Just look for cheap flights to lagos and/or other cities of Africa and witness the endless series of miracles with your own eyes."


Amen to that, brother! I bear the same sentiments, see.


I hope this will encourage everyone to moderate their comments.
As a footnote, please visit the blog of the inimitable, mysterious and utterly lazy Ms B, at Lack-A-Daisy. Percy needs a good home in Ms B's garden.

Please mind the gap between the train and the cosmic recesses of outer space.

Today I was doing a spot of digging in an area of the garden I've never dug.  As gardeners, I'm sure we all find interesting bits and pieces. I regularly find old medicine bottles, as a previous owner was involved with pharmacy. I've also found thin, sealed-glass straws, containing various plant names on small slithers of paper.

This is probably one of the most intriguing items I've discovered. The actual piece is a few centimetres thick, and would happily fit in the palm of your hand. The image has been applied in a thin glaze. 

It's not from a vase, as it is completely flat. The glaze undulates slightly, in a solid, non-moving kind of way.

Unfortunately the light bulbs don't do it any justice (the table is pure white). The background is a deep, navy blue. At first I thought the subject was a woman, but I think I may have got that wrong. The animal looks like a rabbit, I reckon.

We aren't far away from the Mediaeval Merton Priory. I wonder...

Another archaeological find is my angry African. He's a bit bigger, and is carved from stone. He is likely to be a lot younger than the first piece. I found him when I was walking through a busy shopping area in Harare. I looked down, and there he was, staring angrily up through the blades of grass. A bit of digging resulted in a rather special holiday memento.

Being left buried like that, I suppose I'd be angry too.

Please insert interesting blog title.

Two ingredients for a rather dull blog post.

1) I'm bored with trying to think of interesting blog titles.

I was going to use the following title for this post; "The Days Are Getting Longer", but realise most readers would probably fall asleep, in the time it took to follow the link to the post. I may go down the road of Mr J.A-S and just use faintly ridiculous titles. I think it's a good idea, so I'm going to go with the surrealist titles from now on. Be warned.

2) I started this post without having much of an idea of what I was going to write about. Let us see what this evolves into.

The days are getting longer. It's still cold. The birds are making the sounds they make in spring. Talking of birds - I was amazed by the numbers that descended on our bird feeders when we had the snow. Fieldfares, redwings, jays, parakeets, spotted woodpecker, three robins at one time, coal tits, long-tailed tits, blue and great. Then there were the regulars too feral and wood pigeons, starlings, blackbirds and sparrows. People concerned about sparrows in gardens really shouldn't be. Nowadays gardens offer a great deal to a far more diverse range of bird species.

 This time of year is a time when the gardener psyches him or herself up for the season ahead. Last minute shrub transplanting. Winter pruning. Seed ordering. What really gets me, is the heady excitement of having the new season creeping up on us. Last night I was thinking about my garden plans/business plans/ life in general from about 10.30pm to around 2am.

This is what happens to me at this time of year. It's not good because I just end up wandering around in a zombie-like trance for most of the following day. I wonder if other gardeners are like this, or is it just me?

I am seriously considering meeting the other UK garden bloggers at The Malvern Show. Looks like fun, and it would be great to meet some of the people I've commented to, or messaged.

The weather has been rather dull and grey, but it really is an important time of year to get planning and thinking ahead. The dullness now, also makes spring a lot more appealing.

Erm, I think that might be it. If you've read this far, you should be knighted.

Here are some pictures of January in my 'hood.

A few weeks ago in the snow. That's the tower at Crystal Palace in the distance.

The sunset this evening. Bit of a stunner.

Oh.

What's occurin'?

So a belated Happy New Year to my blog followers and anyone that happens to pop by here. I hope everyone had a good Christmas/festive season.

I had a nice Christmas. It already seems so long ago! You may have seen my post on wild mushroom picking. If not, here it is. For the main Polish Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve, we make little dumplings ('Uszka' which literally translates as ears) filled with the wild mushrooms and served in homemade beetroot soup. It's yummy.

I always feel there should be more photos of soup on garden blogs.

 Just after Christmas I went to see Avatar at the iMax in Waterloo. It was in 3D. It was the most amazing (a word I feel can never be over-used) film and cinematic experience I think I've had. It was all rather exhilerating.

Of course I shall have to link this post to plants in some way. I'm a big fan of computer-graphic jungles, and there were many an intriguing alien plant in Avatar. If you haven't seen it, you must go. There are some underlying messages about having a deep respect for nature and the appreciation and conservation it deserves from us. As gardeners we know this already, being sons and daughters of the soil.

Unfortunately I think I caught the flu at the cinema. Not just any flu either. It was the Swine Flu. I started feeling peaky around New Year (and was fast asleep when Big Ben sounded at midnight). My condition deteriorated a couple of days into January, and I was knocked for six.

Fortunately the gardeners on Twitter kept me amused when I was feeling really rough and ratty. Thank you. You know who you are..

I'm feeling great now, though it took a while to recover fully. What with the snow and all, it was a while before I could get back to work. Before you say anything, it is rather difficult to tidy gardens when the snow is heavy on the ground.

Moving on. I think regular readers might have noticed that this post has been somewhat wordy, and devoid, thus far, of a photo of some botanic subject. This is due to a blip with my Macbook. All fixed now, but my photos are all on CDs, and I'm planning to round off my Africa blog series in a simple link to a photo-sharing website. Just waiting for a chance to upload them all, I'm sure it's quite a slow process. Watch this space. It'll be good.

Okay, I've had a quick look and found some poor-quality iPhone photos of some beautiful effects the cold weather had on some rather normal plants.

Ivycicles

Winter chard 

Mutare - Eastern Zimbabwe

A garden full of the most weird and wonderful plants. Prehistoric-looking cycads and Araucaria greeted us at this garden near Mutare. Conveniently the father of my friend runs it, and so we had a good nose around. The grounds are fairly extensive, and hold a huge selection of subtropical plants.

Once again, I have so many pictures, it's a shame I can't bore you with all of them. The atmosphere in these gardens was quite tranquil, and other-worldly.

A reminder of how the downfall in the Zimbabwean economy affects the smallest things. This garden had one of the nicest collections of cycads I saw in Zimbabwe. Most cycads in public gardens are dug up and sold to collectors. Below is a rare cycad which is native to the region. There used to be many wild specimens, but the native people of Zimbabwe and bordering Mozambique have been so short of food at times, that these have been harvested. The centre of the stems can be dried and made into a rough flour. When the plant has been growing for 50-100+ years, it is a shame for them to end up this way.

A very photogenic Frangipani, blooming its' head off.

An amazing selection of moisture-loving tropicals in one of the shade houses. The atmosphere here was amazing, with a beautiful selection of plants.

If I'm going to get through blogging all of this trip I'm going to have to skip some great stuff. Mutare is set at some altitude, in a valley surrounded by mountains. Having seen some heavy rains a few weeks prior to my visit, the land was green and lush.

We went for sun-downers (alcohol and sunset are a good combination), at a local look out. The skies gradually cleared.

To reveal a most picturesque landscape. Below a setting suns' rays shine through the foliage of a Protea sp.

Mutare has to be one of my favourite places in Zimbabwe. The landscape after the rains is not too different to England on a summers day. I would love to go back one day.

A storm cloud bubbles up behind us, in the light of a full moon.

Darkness falls across the town of Mutare.

1st anniversary.

I hope the new layout of the blog meets people's approval. I will probably get bored again, and change it, but it'll have to do for now.

It's the first anniversary of my holiday to Southern Africa. I have held back from writing about my holiday before, as this is a garden blog. However, over the course of the year, I've come to realise that garden bloggers appear to discuss most other things, and rarely mention gardens..

Looking back on the pictures, I am quite sad that I can't be there now. Some of you, such as Mr.Colborn, have visited this magical and awe-inspiring part of the world several times. And talk at length about it.

So that's what I'm going to do, to escape the joys of Christmas. Due to work commitments and various other things, I will be unable to revisit Africa for a while. I will be writing a series of posts on my four week holiday, in a bid to try and re-live the time I had there.

In short the itinerary was as follows;
Drive to London Heathrow.
Fly to Johannesburg Airport.
Take connecting flight to Harare, Zimbabwe. Stay overnight.
Drive to Mutare, Zimbabwe. Stay overnight.
Drive to Rio Savane, Mozambique. Have a rest over ten days, and see in the New Year (2009).
Drive back to Mutare.
Drive to Gweru, Zimbabwe. Stay a couple of nights.
Drive to Harare, our base. Stay overnight.
Drive to Chirundu on the Zimbabwean side of the Zambezi river, the border with Zambia. Stay a few nights.
Drive back to Harare, stay a bit, then fly back to snowy London.

What carbon footprint?

Here are some pictures of the first few days in Mozambique.

Our car tyre went on the main road from Mutare to Beira, so we were forced to stop in a small village. The adults watched us change the tyre from the other side of the road, while the kids came for a closer look. These were the first few kids that arrived at the scene. Being situated on the main road, these Portuguese speakers were more than happy to pose when I asked them for a photo.

By the time we were ready to continue on our journey, there was a group of about thirty five children helping and then waving us off!

Taking a sharp turn left, off the main road, we made our way through a market and village. We did have to drive around some rather large, water-filled potholes.

As we drove on through swampy coastal land, the main dirt track was the causeway for the local bus.

After unpacking our camping gear onto a boat, we crossed the river to the main camp at Rio Savane. We dragged our things through the camp.

The camp was beautiful. It was based in a grove of mature coconut trees, on a spit of land surrounded by the river and the Mozambique Channel of the Indian Ocean.

The sun quickly went down, and we had a much-needed swim in the warm sea, under the stars.