Helen Lehndorf
writer
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unexciting gluts
Sometimes I end up with an unexciting glut in the garden. Recently it was silverbeet. A silverbeet glut is not like a tomato glut, or an apple glut – where your friends will get excited and happily take bagsful off your hands or you can make bulk delicious things like ketchup and apple sauce. I…
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the poppies live on
A few years ago, I rescued a whole lot of plants from a garden in my old neighbourhood which was about to be demolished. When I moved to my new house, just over a year ago, I was careful to shift a lot of the tiny poppy baby plants from the legacy of that garden-save.…
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‘The Comforter’ has a cover!
My book is going to print at the end of this week! I can’t believe it. Helen Rickerby, who owns Seraph Press and edited the book, has somehow made the process of editing and co-ordinating the book (seem) effortless AND even fun. She is a wonderful editor who really gets behind the poets she publishes,…
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the trail is not a trail
One of my favourite poets is American poet Gary Snyder. He is described as the ‘poet laureate of deep ecology’ by some and I would agree with that. I guess he is a natural fit for me – he studied Zen Buddhism in Japan for years and writes a lot about the human spirit and nature.…
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peel the beet
The garden is warming up to the point that some of the things which have been in it over the winter are starting to bolt. I harvested my beetroots the other day, as they’d been in there since autumn. Time to pick them to make room for some more exciting summer vegetable. Beetroots are great…
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snatched creativity
Mothers who are also creatives (writers/artists/musicians etc) are extremely resourceful in terms of snatching creative time from days that fill up (and sometimes overflow) with children and domestic stuff and work. I feel like everything I make is done in intense short bursts, taking half an hour here, an hour there, ten minutes over here…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Helen Lehndorf 