UK and Eire: Flora

When I was a child, Cicely Mary Barker's English Flower Fairy books were another huge influence on my inner life.

In those days, through children's storybooks and Australian suburban gardens viewed while walking to and from school, the blossom trees, cottage gardens and wayside weeds of the UK & Eire were more familiar to me than the native flora of my country of birth.

I love their rich luxuriance, their frothy bounty, their colours, their seasonal changes, their lore. An example? Hawthorn hedges.

(c) 2009 Cecilia Dart-Thornton