Kiwi Magic
September and officially spring in New Zealand, but what that means outside the window depends on where you live. Up here in the Far North, just within the subtropics, already evenings are lighter and...
View ArticleBee’s Knees, Tongues and Other Bits
NZ flax flower (Phormium tenax) Spring, so full of expectations. To be alive in spring is to be whirled up into spirals of hope; of unfolding leaves, pending buds, and new beginnings. While waiting...
View ArticleThe Languages of Storytelling – YoiFest 2014
Anu Paulose giggles with nerves, waiting to perform her story. She will explain the gist of the tale in English before telling the story in her native language – Hindi. Like all the storytellers at...
View ArticleFood, glorious food…
A pragmatic traveller rather than a gourmet ‘to-go’, I rarely write about eating. But in the first of a series about my recent sojourn in Wellington, I decided to make an exception and start with...
View ArticleFinding Deep Character
Every plot has been used before, but each character can be unique. It seems that the success of a writers’ workshop is in direct proportion to the presenter’s state of exhaustion afterwards. But it was...
View ArticleBooks, books, books
If I know a book’s details I can order it, or I can search a topic to see what is available, but that’s all pretty mundane. What I enjoy about browsing in bookshops is the serendipity: you never know what
View ArticleThe Languages of Storytelling – YoiFest 2014
Anu Paulose giggles with nerves, waiting to perform her story. She will explain the gist of the tale in English before telling the story in her native language – Hindi. Like all the storytellers at...
View ArticleFood, glorious food…
A pragmatic traveller rather than a gourmet ‘to-go’, I rarely write about eating. But in the first of a series about my recent sojourn in Wellington, I decided to make an exception and start with...
View ArticleBooks, books, books
If I know a book’s details I can order it, or I can search a topic to see what is available, but that’s all pretty mundane. What I enjoy about browsing in bookshops is the serendipity: you never know...
View ArticleSeeds of the Five Acre Forest
My view on a bright sunny day – clouds paddling in the lake, trees preening along the water’s edge – and it is what I saw from the top of an eroded, weed-infested hill in New Zealand’s far north The...
View ArticleForests: Courting, or Wilding?
The emotional aspects of conservation create deep bonds with the land The post Forests: Courting, or Wilding? first appeared on Trish Nicholsons Words in the Treehouse.
View ArticleSpring in the Five Acre Forest
Spring releases a fresh sense of urgency in the forest. Here in New Zealand, spring begins on the first day of September. I listen for the harbinger of the season, pipiwharauroa, the shining...
View ArticleThe Round Garden in the Five Acre Forest
The five acre forest now clothes an ancient migrated dune; it is all sand and therefore dry land. After twenty years of clearing and planting, topsoil is beginning to form where tree debris has been...
View ArticleBeneath the Five Acre Forest
A forest is never complete; nothing in nature is ever truly finished. All living things exist in a state of transition, of becoming and, therefore, of perpetual uncertainty and change – and not only...
View ArticleTime in The Five Acre Forest
For one person to hand plant five acres of hillside with native trees takes years. And the trees may take decades to reach maturity. But the creation of a forest community extending above and below...
View ArticleLove in the Tree House
As the old song says: “Love is a many splendored thing … nature’s way of giving a reason to be living,” and we teasingly call courting couples ‘love birds’. But do birds experience love? It’s a moot...
View ArticleLove in the Tree House: Part 2
We left the herons building their nest and trying it out for size. (If you missed Part 1 it is here.) When a gang of noisy magpies charged around the tree-house pine and the neighbouring casuarina...
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