Melbourne Style

Melbourne is downright friendly. I’m staying with friends in the inner north where you can find a cute caravan on the street, veggie garden in the front yard and crazy chickens out the back. People say hi to total strangers around here.

Melbourne is known as the city with four seasons in one day so I took my raincoat, sunhat and water bottle and headed along the bike path to CERES, the environmental education centre and urban farm alongside the Merri Creek. I love their slogan:

Our vision is for people to fall in love with the Earth again.

You can fix your bike or learn how to do it. It’s all about community sharing.

And education.

You can also volunteer. There’s plenty of projects from constructing a Playspace to Creating a Meditation Space. I don’t have any affiliation with CERES but I’m a sucker for community projects.

I’m going to borrow a few more words from the CERES website:

‘Along with Merri Creek Management Committee and Friends of Merri Creek, CERES and volunteers planted hundreds of trees and shrubs and lobbied governments to clean up the creek. In 1994, after 12 years of remediation work, Sacred Kingfishers returned to nest along the banks of the creek, having been absent for many years.

Now, CERES is an award-winning community place that is visited by people from around the world who want to understand how this place has come to be, and how they can take some of the ingredients back to their own places.’

‘We think the key ingredient is love for each other and the Earth.’

I have to agree.

Happy Travelling!

The Garden Path

I found Maud Rebiere at the bottom of her garden in the south of France, collecting petals in a wicker basket she made when there was more time to play. Plants are her life and this is the busy season. She harvests medicinal herbs from the plants she grows from seed and gathers wild plants from nature in areas untouched by agricultural sprays. The herbal teas and balms she makes are organically certified .

Maud understands the importance of the natural world and the need for biodiversity to pollinate plants and she passes her knowledge on to groups who visit the historical farm, Le Parcot, at Échourgnac in the Dordogne region.