The Wild Garden and the Captive Garden

Things have been moving very fast this week. Tenille from Charles Darwin Uni has been here working with a group of young women who are all enthusiastic about getting the garden going next to the Women Centre. The blokes have been scraping away all the buffel grass and rubbish with heavy machinery and I better hurry up and get the materials for a fence! There's no time to wait for a grant so it will come from our budget. Meanwhile I comb the net for appropriate sources of funds. Any suggestions are welcome - but they must be OK for the NT.

We are beginning to be able to put away some funds from op-shop sales for projects like this. And today we launched our first raffle - a good raffle once a month will boost the coffers. We have bought a good stack of beads online and there is a small group just starting to get into making jewellery. The old ladies are working hard at burning holes in the yininti beans and making beautiful necklaces.




Last weekend I went with Steve and Sunny to Trephina Gorge, a very special and awe-inspiring place about 80k from Alice and these are some of the photos. The wild places here are so deeply and surprisingly fertile and beautiful.









Yesterday we went out in the troopy to a spot about 30k east of here, where the most beautiful mountains rise from the plain - and where the minkulpa (bush tobacco) grows. I spent much of the day climbing impossibly steep and rocky and prickly slopes and finally came down at dusk with bagful of minkulpa to distribute.


The hillside is a botanists delight, a native garden crammed full of beautiful medicinal and food plants. And up there I feel free (if hot!) and can gaze upon the magnificent ancestor mountains stretching away over the plains. Birds fly close overhead and there are kangaroos somehow managing to bound down the hillside.



Even the grasshoppers are beautiful as they jump up all around. My feet are still sore, thongs aren't made for climbing and rock-hopping, but it was a good day. Today I have been clearing out the van because I think I'll sell it when I get back from NSW. And I set up an automatic watering system so my greens will survive while I am away. And I cleaned the house. Very exciting.

I will be back home next week and look forward to seeing everyone there. I am also looking forward to a rest and some freedom from responsibility - and swimming in the sea! Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......................and a little cooler weather will be nice. Though I woke to the sound of light rain today (it only lasted an hour or so) and have not had to have the aircon on all day since. The papers tell me that February was almost 3 degrees hotter than average and the hottest and driest on record...roll on sustainable power out here (quick! get rid of those generators!) A few big settlements now have solar and maybe Papunya will some day soon. Meantime, I await the cooler days - and right now the blessed rain is falling slow and steady!