Frozen delights

Woo hoo! I've made it into the Arctic Circle with the little red dots of readership of my Garden Amateur blog. See below for what I'm rabbiting on about this time...

I'm talking about that 'Small World' Revolver Map thingy
at the top right side of my blog, where the world
spins around serenely, with little red dots showing the
places where all the blog readers come from. Circled
in green above are the readers from inside the
Arctic Circle. Not sure what part of my semi-
subtropical blog lured them here, probably just
the promise of lush greenery and time to dream. 

For the geographically challenged, this is what
I mean by the Arctic Circle. It's the bit where the
sun don't shine in winter, or where the sun never
sets in summer (depending on how you view that
proverbially half-empty/half-full glass, I guess).
It's the area above latitude 66.6° North.

Down South, there's a whole lot less land inside
the Antarctic Circle which isn't Antarctica. In
fact there's none. The closest I can get a loyal/
occasional blog reader is in the Falkland Islands,
also known as the Islas Malvinas (don't want to
alienate the Argentinian readership!).

A couple of years ago I published a totally fruitless blog posting here begging for someone to contact a scientist/relative stationed in Antarctica, asking them to just visit my blog for a second or two, so I could earn a precious red dot on the icy southern continent. But alas, no such luck. It would be nice to feel that all Continents have readers who drop in here at least once or twice, but this map-loving boy can only hope.

I do always love watching that Revolver Globe spinning around at the top of my blog, so wonderful to think that people as far apart as Alaska, Greenland, Brazil, South Africa, USA, UK, Italy, Yemen, India, Bolivia, Guatemala, Iceland, Argentina, Madagascar, Norway... (you get my continental drift... lots and lots and lots of places)... drop in here occasionally.

So a very big "HELLO WORLD" to absolutely all of you; hope it's all growing well in your little patch, and thank you for visiting my little patch.

Hello Greenland!

Regular readers of my gardening blog might, if they have an exceptional memory, remember a posting I did in October last year, wondering if anyone with a relative serving on a scientific base in Antarctica could persuade them to visit my blog and give me at least one lovely red dot to signify that "I have visited Jamie's blog from here on the icy continent, Antarctica".

So far no luck on the Antarctic front, but yesterday I noticed a red dot in just as good a spot, but way, way up north: the north-west tip of Greenland, with water views of the Arctic Ocean. Hello Greenland! How's your summer going?

Here's a moderately blurry screen grab of the spinning wheel thingy on the right side of this blog, which shows a red dot for every visitor here. While all the visits from Australia, NZ, Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and beautiful islands everywhere are always a pleasure to behold, I've gone all silly about that red dot in Greenland (helpfully circled in green)! And so here's a photo for everyone in the icy north who drops in here, presumably to warm up...

No, this isn't my shot, I pinched it from this website, but I just thought it was appropriate to mark the occasion. I don't grow gerberas and we don't get snow here in Sydney, but I just liked the idea of a flower in the snow (it's almost certainly a florist shop's gerb just bunged into the snow and photographed quickly, before it carked it, but it's art).

I like visiting gardening blogs from all around the world, because they all eloquently say that no matter where you are, there is life growing, and a crazy human is there to lend a hand. There's a famous Australian expression, first coined by a boxing champion from my own suburb, 'The Marrickville Mauler', who, after yet another win in the ring, told his fans "I love youse all".

Looking at that spinning wheel of the Earth, you can see red dots all the way up the northern coast of Norway, into the Arctic Circle; there's one on the western shore of Hudson Bay which I presume is around the town of Churchill in Canada (hi!), I see two lovely red dots on Iceland, and there are red dots on the northern, Arctic Ocean side of Alaska, too. Hi to all of you, too! Thanks for visiting my little green patch here in the temperate zone.

Chilling out

I was looking at the little spinning globe thingy on the top right side of my blog, the one which records little red dots for all the different places where visitors to my blog have come from. I love the fact that there are dotty people on every continent dropping in here occasionally. I sometimes wonder how people in Uzbekistan, Alaska, the Congo, central Saudi Arabia and all sorts of very different places could end up here, but they do, and I love it. So, as I explored the world checking out visitors I then spun the globe around to the view from way, way, way Down Under and – shock, horror – there are no gardeners in Antarctica!

And so I was wondering if anyone out there has a relative working somewhere in Antarctica who could do me a little favour. If you contact them via email, could you ask them to drop by and visit Jamie at Garden Amateur, so I can have a nice red dot on that crisp, white background, to complete my "red dots on all continents" collection?

I guess I could do a posting on "fun with algae" or "hardy mosses for windy spots" or "coping with frosts below -50°C" to increase my chances of a spontaneously generated Antarctic dot, but I hope the quicker route of appealing for readers to email relatives serving on an Antarctic scientific station might do the trick.

In the meantime, a big THANK YOU to all those dotty visitors out there, wherever you are, including Antarctica. I plan to keep a lookout for red dots way, way down South.