In Search of Colour - Chapter 1- Our Search for Colour

In Search of Colour seeks out just that. We want to see what Mother Nature can provide closer  to home and on a haphazard basis, circulating now and again from home.

I look at the map of the major trips so far and feel something is missing. Focussing on our local area, and here we talk about the Mid North Coast of New South Wales starting with our own patch of colour – our backyard we are going to look in depth on something Mother Nature has on offer. They might be hers individually or those created at the hand of a human. But no matter what we find it will be colourful

It might be something as small as a garden, a beach, a park or simply something Mumma paints of her own accord like an impending storm or even an entire town

Far less planned than the major trips I suspect we will be off in the van from time to time on short jaunts as the tentacles of this project extend around but in the short term a drive her or a drive there might suffice to come with a story and gobsmacking pictures of the scenery and the flora up close and personal. We will probably let the images talk for themselves a lot more rather than rabbit on about our getting into mischief.

Why do it? 

A few reasons really. First and foremost because when we post photographs of our garden we get lots of very positive feedback. Secondly, whilst we have had two long trips around Australia, the caravan craves more and whilst there are other “long” trips in the pipeline, having a significant investment simply sitting in the garage doesn’t make sense. And thirdly whilst there have been times when we have found ourselves in botanical type gardens in various towns around the country, the focus is more on the trip as opposed to the stopping and smelling of the roses.

With this almanac we are looking to focus on the vista and the enormity of Mother Nature’s power. Something that despite all our efforts to combat her power, Frank L Lucas said it best in Beleaguered Cities, a poem from my childhood:

Build, build your Babels black against the sky-

But mark yon small green blade, your stones between them

The single spy

Of that uncounted host you have outcast

For their tiny pennons waiving green

They shall storm your streets at last

Where he mocked our efforts to contain Her, moving into the “real” first verse of My Country by Dorothea MacKellar (not the one that starts “I love a sunburnt country” which is actually the second verse, and her “ordered woods and gardens”. I too “know but cannot share it, My love is otherwise” and what Mother Nature has been, can be, when worked in company with the fleeting influence of us as the gardener, be it at a home level on a balcony, in a garden around a house or at a more macro level of the framer with the sweeping landscape of cereal crops and plantation forests basking in the sun, or other major undertakings, there is grandeur to be found.

That is what we are about. We go In Search of Colour and what we fiend we share.