Gabby Malpas and Sarah Ryan at Chapel House, Rydal

Now that Spring has truly sprung downunder, this year's garden shows are in full swing.
Sarah and I had a lovely weekend and star billing at the Rydal Daffodil festival at Chapel House.

Chapel house is owned by Jo and Mike Maxwell who look after the extenive 10 acre gardens and grounds themselves.

Lotus

I love lotus.

I fell in love with these plants as soon as I saw one in the Auckland domain hothouse garden in the 70s.  There were these dinner plate-sized leaves coming straight out of the pond with these gorgeous, billowy, pink, cloud-like flowers floating above.

It has been a dream of mine to paint these beauties on large pieces of paper and although I use a lot of artistic license and google imagery, I still need to draw from life to capture the lotus mojo.

We see a lot of lotus on our travels all over SE Asia.  However, without being able to dedicate some serious hours to looking and drawing and requiring space enough for a large sheet of paper it's not really feasible.

I planted one just after Christmas when my first attempt failed in a pot.  I am so excited to see one of the leaves finally pushing up through the water to stand tall.  Hopefully others will follow.

It will be another year before it flowers though.  Back to google.

The studio this week

 

Christmas is almost upon us.

A frantic time of year for so many but for me, a chance to spend time building up a new body of work and to work on new ideas.

I am loving the blue and white lotus bowl that is on loan from my sister in law.

Happy holidays everyone.

New work

Part of my new work for Winter 2012 - cottage garden series.

More are on my Facebook page.

Please like my page - every bit helps.

Summer ginger

Still painting

I was looking for waterlilies last week but they didn't have any so I got ginger spikes instead.

These take me back to Auckland - the scent of the flowers in the night breeze is just magical.

bromeliad

After four years my bromeliad has bloomed again. There was originally one spike. That died to make way for three little 'pups' that grew into three flowering spikes.

I think I need a bit more practice with the foliage.

hibiscus

I picked these flowers on Christmas day and started painting them today.

If you see a strange woman around Sydney picking flowers from bushes on the side of the road she may be painting them instead of just putting them on top of the telly....

Christmas bush

Yesterday I had a craft fair at my house. More cupcakes and ginger cookies amongst other things were made, the place cleaned and materials put away for the day.

Some of my lovely friends brought flowers.

The tiny pinky flowery bush is called 'Christmas bush' because it flowers right on Christmas time and is apparently everywhere in the Australian bush (Aussies don't mince words). It really is fantastic to look at en masse - and compliments those bright yellow gerberas very well.