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By the Grace of God Nursery

Welcome to gardening Kenyan-style – a plant and tree nursery in Embu on the foothills of Mount Kenya – and a visit there by blogging chum, Dr Ian Cross who is currently volunteering his expertise in that town after a gruelling stint at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh:

Have Stethoscope, Will Travel

Albert and his son, Samwell, run a plant nursery about a kilometre away from my home in Spring Valley Road. One of my colleagues had bought a plant here last month and another colleague wanted to know if she could buy a basil plant. “It is good for making tea to treat respiratory infections,” she said. They asked me if I wanted to accompany them on a visit to the nursery and I gladly accepted.

The dirt roads around Embu have been a quagmire for the past month but we have not had any heavy rain for two days and the mud has dried out. We found Albert using a scalpel to whittle away at a shoot of a macadamia plant. He slotted it into a “V” shaped notch in the top of a sapling which was also a macadamia, but a different variety. Then he bandaged the two together…

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Guest Challenge: Knowing your place (colour photo challenge)

This week I’m also over at Paula’s blog, Lost in Translation. She kindly asked me to post a guest photo challenge ‘Knowing My Place’. It’s all about finding some cunning new angle that tells you something fresh about a place you think you know very well. To find out more read on, and to see Paula’s own amazing photo response go HERE:

Lost in Translation

Tish Farrell:

Music: Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge song cycle inspired by A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad

January can be a lowering month – at least in the North. We are expected to burst, sparkling new, into the New Year, when we might feel more jaded than go-ahead. Hopefully this photo prompt will have you seeing things in a new light.
I’ve called it ‘Knowing My Place’, and you can interpret it in any way that strikes you. ‘My Place’ will be somewhere that you think you know inside out: your home town or street, the journey to work, your office, kitchen, garden or desk; your state of mind, or work in progress. Now search it with the camera’s eye. Sleuth out an angle that starts to tell you something new about it.
When I first thought of the prompt I was thinking about my home town, Much…

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Windows Into The Inner Sanctum

Such a stunning insight into inner turmoil and trauma – from The Beauty Along the Road

The Beauty Along the Road

So often we think of windows as enabling us to look OUTSIDE. However, I’d like to introduce a window that allows us to look INSIDE, specifically, into the inner workings of the psyche. As a former psychologist with a specialty in playtherapy, I used sandplay therapy with both children and adults to gain a better understanding of what my clients were struggling with. Sandplay was truly a window of privilege – no other technique revealed as much about what was really going on INSIDE.

“At the beginning in sandplay, we observe images of the daily world, its difficulties. When we continue this work, we get into deeper realms of ourselves. We discover contents which have remained unknown. They have become dark and negative. All of our potentials would like to be developed. If they are not taken care of, they get furious and work against us.

Beyond this darkness is the…

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