Mother Nature's Laughter

The day is dull and overcast, not common in this sunny part of Queensland but it really didn't matter. We are visiting Mother Nature's Laughter garden in the lovely suburb of Bellbird Park. The gate is purple. The colour pops.

The flowers in the front garden are popping too though it is autumn here. Part magic, part careful planning of Antonia, our gracious grey haired garden owner, dressed in a red cardigan and red shoes, sporting a pretty hairclip on her beautiful curls and a necklace of lime green and purple. I think you are getting the picture of this wonderful septuagenarian even if I have resisted the temptation of photographing her for you. She grew up in Holland and endured the war years. Her joy was picking wild flowers and it is something that has stayed with her. She talks about the importance of keeping the child within you, that ability to sense and feel without necessarily having the knowledge or the maturity. Children feel and sense so easily. She urges us to keep that within us and tells us of how she fell in love with her little house and bought it within the day.

How she raised four children on her own and struggled with little money and drought and cancer and how the garden was and is her salvation, a garden full of the most wonderful native and non native plants, where bees buzz in amongst the blood red flowers of the climber in full bloom. We had to  duck down to enter the verandah which looks out onto a slope of verdant shrubs and mature trees. 

We have a cup of tea and some cake and even her kitchen window is perfection in colour.

We walk around and she talks about her plants and offers us all cuttings, she talks about the steps she made, the rocks she carried, the buckets that were needed to keep the plants alive in the prolonged drought.Everything was planted by her and nurtured by her with losses and failures along the way.
There was nothing when she first moved in, so the garden has grown with her years.

Her face is a vision of kindness and compassion, calmness and creativity. I loved the day and meeting Antonia and promised to return with my husband, the keen gardener in my family.