Four weeks in one day

We Sydneysiders can be quite oddly proud of our rain at times. We get quite a lot of rain, especially for such a sunny city, so how do you combine lots of sunshine with lots of rain? Easy ... just make sure the rain buckets down when it does so.

This morning is a classic example: a whole average month's worth of rain (83mm for November) in a couple of hours in several parts of Sydney. My how it rained (and still is)! As a rain radar fan, I just have to share this random shot of our fair town this morning.

The red and orange bits show the heaviest rain, and this morning they are doing their thing complete with thunder and lightning flashes; at its peak the grumbly bits seemed to be about 10 seconds apart. It was a good one, if you were safe inside your house that is.

All the truck and delivery drivers, commuters, public transport staff, homeless people and emergency services workers had a different, more scary experience, of course, so all I can do is hope they got through it OK.

But here in selfish little gardener-who-works-from-home land, it was mostly perverse fun.

(I should at this stage put in a special mention for art teachers, too, such as Pammy. She is conducting a watercolour workshop this morning on, ironically enough ... skies and clouds, and so her mobile phone has been running hot with text messages from students asking whether the workshop is still on. It is, and god bless their cotton socks, all of them are still attending, and with help from her loyal driver and husband, Pammy will have to make the dash to the studio a couple of streets away where she conducts her classes.)

Click on this photo and should come up as a big, wide, soggy panorama. No need to water the garden this morning!

This downpour is perfect timing for our garden. I spent all of Sunday pulling out weeds, spreading mulch, and adding some fragrant Dynamic Lifter (chicken poo) organic pellets here and there. Thanks Huey for the perfect timing. Garden health is rated good right now.

This soggy sight is the other side of the garden, and in the middle foreground, that little bare patch of ground with green seedlings coming up is an experiment with seeds. Last year I grew little Zinnia linearis there, and they flowered all summer long. At the end of summer I harvested the seed heads, popped them into paper bags to dry off in the shed over winter, and so a month or so ago I scattered the seedy contents of the paper bags over the bare ground, watered it well that day and every day for the next two weeks, and lo and behold I have stacks of zinnia babies coming up.

The other great thing about very rainy days is the opportunities it provides to amateur photographers like me. Leaves and water are a magical combo, such as this mini lake perched precariously on the tough, strong leaf of our potted fig tree.

The other photogenic thing about rain is the sight of usually glamorous garden beauties drooping and drenched with rain. This NSW Christmas Bush, also in a pot, is looking truly gorgeous in the late November sunshine, but even in the aftermath of today's storm it's still lovely to behold.

So don't just stand there at your window looking out at your soggy mess. Get out there in amongst it; you'll get some great photos and see a side of your garden that only happens now.

If that sounds weird, don't worry. I'm from Sydney, we like our rain. We're strange that way.

Gone sub-troppo

Wow, two holidays in two months. That's some kind of record for us. But that's just how things have worked out recently. In January Pam and I went troppo in tropical Darwin, and last week we dashed up to subtropical Brisbane to see friends and also to catch the Asia Pacific Triennial Art Show at the Qld Gallery of Modern Art before it closed. Having been blown away by the previous Asia Pacific art show three years ago, there was no way we were going to miss this one. And besides, Brisbane is quite green and lush right now, so there was plenty for garden-lovers to take in, too. What follows is a bit of both (and all photos are by our official family holiday snapper, my wife Pammy).

First, a garden-themed cornucopia by Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi, that's about 15 feet high and 20 feet wide. I came across it by turning a corner, then wham! Worked for me.

Outside the art gallery, the gardening staff had made a nice artwork of an ixia hedge in bloom and some neatly trimmed buxus.

Just try to ignore the awful metal barrier at the base of this tree and just take in the astonishing way in which ancient fig trees send down aerial roots which, when they finally touch ground, then grow to become extra tree trunks in themselves. I think this is just one tree, even if it looks like a forest. It's a Moreton Bay Fig in the City Botanic Gardens in Brisbane.

This was our view from the balcony of our apartment in Spring Hill, a lovely poinciana in bloom. When old and given space, these trees spread into a wonderfully wide canopy of lacy foliage, topped with red blooms. Last year in a garden-bloggers' meme about desert island plants, I picked a poinciana as one of my three 'desert island plants'.

How's this for a segue from gardening to art? Well, it's the best I can do. It's by Zhu Weibing and it's called, sensibly enough, 'People Holding Flowers'. Full of subversive symbolism to those familiar with the history of Mao Zedong's purges in the Communist China of the 50s and 60s, it's an outwardly cheerful image which contains within a sinister message about the loss of individuality in modern China.

The choice of materials in many pieces is so important. Here, Pam and her great mate Judi spent ages admiring this exquisitely detailed work in silk embroidery by South Korean artist Kyungah Ham. (Both artists, Pam and Judi love going to galleries together. While they of course admire the art for its imagery, colour and meaning, both of them spend ages checking out the technical aspects of how each piece is actually made.) But these weren't the only nuclear mushroom clouds on show.

Indian artist Subodh Gupta's huge mushroom cloud of old brass and copper pots, pans and other utensils is a spooky thing to stand under. It rises at least 15 feet tall and softly glows through the patina of clapped out, ordinary objects.

Much more shiny is Mr Gupta's life-size, perfect, solid brass Enfield Bullet motorbike, the hard-working 'milk carrier' model.

As old and authentic as can be is the poignant installation by Chen Qiulin of a real Chinese village house, one of countless thousands destroyed by flooding as a result of the 'Three Gorges' dam project. This is protest art at its most powerful. When you read that this dam project flooded 13 cities, over a hundred towns and over a thousand villages, the callous, arrogant disruption to the traditional way of life of literally millions of people is still a source of huge protest and anger in China. Several other works at the Asia Pacific Triennial by Chinese artists included protests over this Three Gorges catastrophe.

It's amazing what you can find on eBay. Japanese artist Kohei Nawa bought an actual stuffed elk at an online auction site, then transformed it with glass beads. It was set into a room of its own lit with bright white, translucent light which reminded me of a Stanley Kubrick movie's space ship interior. Yes, Hal, there's an elk on board.

Some of the exhibits were to be touched, experienced, like these 'clouds' of white cords suspended from the ceiling (not sure of the artist's name, sorry). A favourite with the kids, of course, and Pam liked it too.

Indonesian artist Rudi Mantofani created several amazing 'unplayable' guitars as a protest against western musicians doing a benefit concert. He's pissed off with the gap between the token philanthropy of rich western – especially American – musicians and the foreign policy of the west towards the muslim world. Those who didn't read his blurb to the left of his exhibit would probably never guess what he was on about. Perhaps the perfect execution of each guitar, absolutely beautiful looking guitars, stole the limelight from his message.

This way to the North Korean section! And no, it wasn't all like this. In fact, the North Korean art included some of my favourite paintings in the show. There was a whole wall of superb linocuts and woodcuts, and another room filled with typical communist subject matter of workers in blast furnaces and factories, but painted not so much in the usual 'heroic' style of North Korea but more in the French impressionist style, where natural light and realism governed the artists' choices.

Finally, here's me discovering yet another astounding bromeliad to stand beside, while grinning stupidly. Brisbane is lovely in summer, and while it's normally very humid and hot and rainy at this time of year, we were lucky with the weather, which was a bit cooler than normal. Everything up there is growing like crazy now. They've gone through a long, harsh drought and only recently the heavens have opened, spectacularly at times. It's nice to see the place green again, though. Great town, Brisbane. I love it.

Hello, anyone still reading? Probably not, as this is a gardening blog! Oh well, that is one of the problems I have with blogging inside a category. I know I could start up an art blog, but I'd only post something once every month or so. As for books and reading I guess I'd post very frequently, to a loyal readership of seven equally strange people. And ditto music, movies, cooking, sport, history, wildlife, ecology and all my other interests.

In fact, I think I might be getting closer to the point where I've said a large part of what I want to say about gardening and maybe I should slow down this Garden Amateur thing after almost two very hectic (for me) years of posting. Not sure what I'll do at this stage. I am still enjoying blogging very much, but I am feeling just a bit restricted by sticking to gardening. My interests are a lot more diverse than just the wonderful world of gardening and plants. Do I start up a second blog or extend the scope of this one? That is the question. (And thanks for reading, if you got this far!)