Helen Lehndorf

Category: nature cure

  • keeping the prunings

    Every time my lavender needs a prune, I tie up the prunings and hang them up in our porch to dry. Then, some months later when I have a spare hour, I pull the dried blooms off the stalks and add them to my lavender jar.

    My friend Melissa makes lovely lavender sachets with hand-printed linens. I think everything Melissa makes is beautiful.

    I like being thrifty and so I get a kick out of turning prunings into something useful. It’s a process that (to me) is lovely at every stage – the lavender is beautiful on the bush while it’s growing, it’s attractive hanging to dry on the porch, it looks nice in a jar and it will be delicious in a sachet – the heady scent of the blooms living on long after the stems have turned to compost.

  • fly away home

    I was sitting at the table and Willoughby said: ‘What’s that black spot on your skirt, Mum?’

    It was a green ladybird (I think) – dark, pearlescent green. I’ve never seen a green ladybird before. I looked it up on the ever-wise internet and found that ladybirds can be “yellow, green, orange, grey, white and brown, but are most commonly red. There is even a breed of ladybird which is black with coloured spots.”

    I got her to model for a couple of photographs and then I went and released her back outside.

    When you wear a lot of floral, you attract all kinds…

     

  • forgetting and remembering

    I’ve had a week of battling my ‘monkey mind’ – that part of the mind that is unsettled and dissatisfied, busy and graceless. This week my monkey mind has been a place of impatience and regret – both fairly useless emotions.

    It’s the school holidays, I’ve got far too much work on my plate (which I can’t get to, because it’s the school holidays) and I’m burning, itching, yearning to get to some creative work -writing and making- which is coming waaaaay last at the moment, because of the aforementioned kids, work.

    Cue the negative internal brain loops.

    The good thing is, I see it, I notice it for what it is – useless thoughts, pointless mental torture – and so as they arise, I work (and boy, does it feel like work) to let them go.

    Feel it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, wrangle with it, notice it, let it go. Feel it, watch it flare, notice it, let it go.

    When I’m wrestling with my demons, the best thing for me to do is to go outside. Be with my plants. They bring me solace. I can get perspective out in the garden, also nothing soothes a restless mind like a bit of weed pulling.

    All over the garden, forget-me-nots have self-seeded. They are growing all over the place, occasionally in an actual garden bed. I didn’t bring them to this yard, so they are an inheritance from the gardeners who lived here before me. I love the self-seeded flowers best of all – staunch, self-sufficient little fellas.

    Bright blue flares of tiny flowers everywhere – they’ve come in just the right week, when I need reminding what is worth remembering and what to forget.

     

     

  • colour in the winter vegetable garden

    I know it is spring now – but in terms of the vegetable garden, most of what is in there is still wintery-fare.

    Where I live, what I can grow in the winter is mostly green things: silverbeet, leeks, spinach, spring onions, brassicas, herbs. I’m grateful to live somewhere where it is possible to grow food all year around, but all the same, by the end of winter – I get a little tired of just greens and look forward to the colours of the summer garden: chillies, tomatoes, nasturtium flowers, the bright red flowers of scarlet runner beans…

    In winter, I have to sneak a bit of colour into the garden – just to cheer me up. This is how I do it:

    Choosing rainbow silverbeet – the stalks are wonderful candy colours – bright pink, orange, yellow.

    & Growing marigolds as companion plants. I know some people think they are tacky – but I love the colour they bring to an otherwise pretty dark winter garden.

    Harvesting greens in my op-shopped bright red colander.

    & Growing radishes – their hot pink pop can really liven up yet another green salad. Also, they grow from seed to plate in about three weeks. The closest thing you can get to instant gratification in a vegetable garden. These ones are ‘French Breakfast’ – which I grow because they are much sweeter and milder than other varieties, so more child-friendly.

    I saw on an Anthony Bourdain Food show that in France people smear these with butter as part of a breakfast meal. I tried it and found it to be kind of gross, to be honest. I think I’ll stick to chopping them up and chucking them in a salad. The French love to put butter on everything, don’t they?

    Have you got any other ideas about adding colour to a winter vegetable garden?

  • grow your own way

    In autumn I planted a whole lot of bulbs: ranunculus, freesias, gladioli…and the other day the first of my ranunculus flowered.

    I bought all white bulbs, as I’d planned to have all white flowers in pots on the porch for added cooling effect, come summer.

    As you can, see not all of the bulbs came up white.

    Hello, bright pink interloper.

    The same thing happened with the dahlias I planted. The packet said ‘white’ and they flowered bright red.

    I don’t really care – in fact it makes me like them even more somehow. I always do like rebels and non-conformists best.

    Also, why should I get to dictate what ends up in my garden? I share the space with all manner of flora and fauna.

    White or not, they are very pretty, right?

     

  • teaching your mother to suck oranges

    I was sitting across from Magnus watching him eat his dessert which was, that night, two cut-up oranges.

    Magnus was really eating those oranges. He was so present in his enjoyment – he was sucking every drop of juice and had the fixed stare of someone experiencing great sensory pleasure.

    I love that about children. They are great teachers in being fully present in the moment.

    Watching Magnus eat an orange made me want to eat an orange, so I did. It was delicious. We sucked oranges companionably for a good ten minutes.

    Messy fruit offers a particular pleasure, I think. Sensual and fun, all at once. It also demands presence of mind. You can’t suck oranges and read. You can’t chew out a mango and talk on the phone.

    Messy fruit as zen practice? Why not.

    At least we are free to suck oranges in public…unlike in this quotation about oranges in Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell:

    “When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges.” 

  • beach treasures

    One of our favourite things to do as a family is visit a body of water – be it creek, river, lake or sea.

    We tend to split into two camps – the stone throwers and the foragers.

    Magnus and Fraser are the stone throwers. Fraser likes to skim stones, so actually, he has to forage a bit for good skimmers.

    Magnus just loves to throw stones in water. He has since he was tiny. So he stands at the water’s edge: plop! plop! plop!

    Willoughby and I are the foragers – we mooch about picking up bits of shell, rock and plant that interest us.

    I’ve taught Willoughby to, at the end of our visit, sort through everything he’s collected and only take home a couple of favourites. (‘Leave only footprints, take only photographs’ etc…) Both of us, with our magpie tendencies find it hard not to take a small treasure home.

    Here is a photograph of us sorting through beach treasure from a recent visit. That’s my lap, and you can just see a bit of W at the top.

    So many lovely things! You can see why it takes us a while to put some of them back.