My garden is significantly less attractive than the garden of Tennyson’s poem, but this blog post will also be significantly less weird, bloody, and tragic, so that should help balance things a bit! My parents are farmers, and my mother has the most spectacularly green thumbs, which sadly I mostly did not inherit.  But I do like  gardening, and I’ve really been enjoying turning the brown, weedy wasteland of a garden that we inherited when we bought the house into something green and growing. Mr D and I have some differences of opinion about how much garden there should be as he prefers LAWN (and pretty much nothing else).  So I haven’t made much headway in my quest to turn the entire front lawn into raised garden boxes (oh, the dream!) but I have been allowed to clear out the three weed-filled garden boxes we inherited, and I have turned them into three mini gardens. The gardens have struggled a bit this year: the weather turned abruptly from quite cold and wet to HOT and …

This is shaping up to be a wonderful year of events and speaking opportunities for me. First there was the Katherine Mansfield Garden Party in Hamilton, and in July I’ll be in California for Costume College, but in between I’m extremely excited about an upcoming talk and fashion show in collaboration with the Katherine Mansfield Museum here in Wellington: From Ruffles to Rebellion: a heritage fashion show Sunday 10 April 2pm Old St Paul’s Tickets $15 I’ll be exploring Mansfield’s life through her clothes, bringing to life the characters in her stories, from Laura in her lace frock and ‘Spanish’ hat in The Garden Party, to the Modern Soul in her stays (which she oughtn’t to wear), Rosabel’s fashionable fantasty outfit of The Tiredness of Rosabel, a swimsuit for By the Bay, and Mrs Norman Knight of Bliss in her infamous banana peel dress. Plus more! It’s going to be fabulously fun and delicious, and I do hope you’ll come!  Follow the link above for tickets! (this is a pinned post, so scroll down for …