Pixie Meadow Flora

31/01/2026

🌬️☃️🌤️🍃☔️🌱❄️🌨️😅

29/01/2026

This was always one of my favourite stories my mum used to tell me of the yearly battle between Jack frost and Greenman aka The Imbolc Battle for the Turning Year.

In the deep hush at winter’s edge, when frost still silvered the fields but daylight lingered just a little longer, Jack Frost held dominion.

He was sharp-boned and bright-eyed, crowned with rime and silence. Wherever his fingers traced, water hardened, sap slowed, and breath hung pale in the air. He was not cruel, but exacting—a keeper of endings, a guardian of stillness. Under his watch, the world rested and endured.

Yet beneath the frozen soil, something stirred.

Roots whispered in the dark. Seeds dreamed of warmth they could not yet name. In hedgerows and hollow trees, in the deep loam and ancient bark, the Green Man began to wake.

On the eve of Imbolc, as hearth fires were lit and candles burned in Brigid’s honour, Jack Frost felt the first loosening of his grip. Snow softened. Icicles wept. Beneath the ice, a quiet green pulse moved through the land like a remembered song.

At dawn, they met.

Jack Frost stood tall in the pale light, his breath sharp as glass, his cloak stitched from snow and silence.
Opposite him rose the Green Man, formed of bark and moss, ivy twined in his beard, eyes glowing with sap and promise.

“You wake too soon,” said Jack Frost. “The world is not ready.”

“The world is never ready,” replied the Green Man. “It only longs.”

Their battle was not fought with blows, but with balance.

Jack Frost sent nights of biting cold, reminding the land of hunger, hardship, and the necessity of rest.
The Green Man answered with snowdrops piercing the frozen ground, with lambs stirring unseen, and with the quiet courage of beginnings not yet visible.

Frost glazed the rivers once more.
Green answered with thaw beneath the surface.

For days they held one another in tension—winter refusing to release, spring refusing to be silenced. And then, slowly and almost imperceptibly, Jack Frost stepped back.

Not defeated.
Never destroyed.

He bowed his head, knowing his work was nearly done.

“I will return,” he said.

“You always do,” the Green Man replied. “And I will wait.”

Jack Frost withdrew to the far edges of the land, lingering in early mornings and shaded hollows. The Green Man did not yet claim full dominion—this was not the time for abundance, only for promise.

And so Imbolc was sealed.

Not as a victory, but as a threshold.

Winter loosened its grip.
Spring drew its first breath.
And the wheel turned on, as it always has—held in balance by frost and green alike.

Artwork created by The Wonky Broomstick

29/01/2026

💚

1970. George Harrison stands at the gates of Friar Park, staring at what everyone else calls a catastrophe.

The Victorian mansion is rotting. Grass pushes through floorboards inside. The estate's gardens, once the pride of England, have gone feral. Collapsed greenhouses. Buried grottoes. Pathways strangled by decades of neglect.

He's 27 years old. The Beatles just ended. He could go anywhere, do anything. The world is waiting for his next move.

He buys the wreck and decides to dig in the dirt.

Not as a weekend hobby. As a life. He hires ten gardeners and works alongside them, dawn to midnight, covered in soil. His sister-in-law takes one look at the estate and asks what he's thinking. George doesn't try to explain. He just keeps digging.

His son Dhani grows up watching his father work by moonlight, squinting in the shadows because darkness hides the imperfections that would bother him during the day. The music industry keeps calling. They want albums. Tours. More of George Harrison the Beatle.

He wants to plant trees.

Friar Park isn't just a garden. It's an eccentric's fever dream from the 1890s. Caves. Underground tunnels. A four-acre Alpine rock garden with a scale Matterhorn on top. Garden gnomes everywhere. He photographs himself among them for All Things Must Pass, then goes back to pruning.

When a nurseryman mentions slow sales, George buys one of everything in the shop. When someone offers 800 varieties of maples, he takes them all. His wife Olivia remembers him saying, "It's not my garden, Liv." He sees himself as a custodian. The garden doesn't belong to him. He belongs to it.

By 1980, he publishes his autobiography and dedicates it "to gardeners everywhere." He writes that he's simple. Doesn't want the business full-time. He's a gardener. He plants flowers and watches them grow.

Journalists visit and call it un-rock-star-ish. George doesn't flinch. He'd lived through Beatlemania, screamed into stadiums, changed culture. He found it hollow compared to restoring topiary.

After John Lennon's murder, the gates lock forever. George and Olivia keep working. Not for visitors. For the work itself.

He dies in 2001. The gardens are now considered masterpieces of Victorian landscaping. Olivia still tends them at Friar Park. The estate stays private.

George Harrison chose dirt under his fingernails over applause. And in that choice, he found something the stadiums never gave him. Freedom.

10/10/2025

Bees, butterflies, and blooms by the bay 🌊💖🦋🌤🌹🐝
at Toronto Butterfly Park 🤩

10/10/2025

10/08/2025

😅💛🐝

Credit: Dave Whamond,
Canadian cartoonist

06/08/2025

My air plant is blooming again😍

06/08/2025

I love this air plant 😍
Like a Phoenix in flames, it fades and is reborn from below each time it blooms❤️‍🔥
✨🧚‍♀️✨
It's a spectacular transformation to watch, as the leaves turn from standard green to this vibrant red and push forward deep purple blooms, centered around that pop of bright yellow pollen. 💚❤️💜💛
It's the first air plant I ever purchased - picked out from a vendor at an orchid show almost nine years ago now. 🥰
It's also the only one I've ever been able to keep alive. 🤭
It never gets taken for a soak... just whatever gets splashed in this pot that it lives inside. I guess it must enjoy its particular level of neglect! 😅

30/07/2025