Guinea Fowl in my garden

Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble.


- Roger Tory Peterson

Watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm

Helmeted guinea fowl (Numida meleagris)

I used to have dozens of guinea fowl pass through our smallholding here in Tarlton (Gauteng, South Africa), but these days it’s like Christmas seeing just a few of them. When we moved to Tarlton in the middle 70’s, we were one of a few owners living on the smallholdings and there were large tracts of open land with hundreds of mammals, birds and reptiles that crossed our paths daily. Snakes were rife and regularly had to be removed to a safer place, now we only see a snake a couple of times in the year. I used to have wild hares entering my garden and eating my Marigolds; I haven’t seen an hare for about 7 years. The same with hedgehogs, monitors, tortoises and jackal.

The area is now totally built up and our smallholding is now flanked by people on all sides, property fenced and surrounded by high walls – there are few, if any, empty tracts of of land anymore and I’m just wondering where all the wildlife has managed to find a safe refuge…

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A garden path

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm 

I always seem to be doing the opposite of what I should, like with gardening. In stead of jumping into gardening like everybody else in Spring, every Autumn I get this inexplicable urge to revamp my garden! I think it must be the cooler weather, much easier carting paving stones and pots around when it's not so hot.

I've just bought 10 bags of compost and a couple of bags of potting soil for a few potted plants and will be feeding the garden just as it wants to rest! But I'm sure all my earth worms will be thankful for a bit of extra sustenance during this cold period...

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This garden that I know

 "There is a garden that is not like the other gardens round about. In many of these gardens the flowers are only prisoners, forced to weave carpets on the changeless turf, and when the eye is sated and the impression palls, they become to their owners, who have no part in them, merely purchased episodes. 

This garden that I know has a bit of green, a space of flowers, and a stretch of wildness, as Bacon says a garden should always have. At its birth, the twelve months each gave to it a gift, that it might always yield an offering to the year, and presently it grew so lovable that there came to it a soul."

From 'The Story of a Garden' by Mabel Osgood Wright (1859-1934)

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The Garden Party

W&N watercolour on Bockingford 300gsm - done from my imagination

"After all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels."

- Katherine Mansfield

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Autumn setting in

“Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.”

- William Cullen Bryant

A daily practice of sketching and painting gives you a chance to exercise the big three P's - practice, practice, practice!

Autumn Setting in - watercolour in Moleskine Watercolour Sketchbook - 8" x 5.5" - Maree

Autumn is in full swing and the trees in my garden are slowly starting to change colour - this is actually a friend's garden on their plot here in Tarlton, South Africa, and I just had to capture her Japanese Maple in all its glorious orange splendour amongst her mostly indigenous trees. She commented that she never knew her garden was so beautiful and that she will be looking at it differently now!