Elsa Pooley and Gillian Condy are a formidable and exceptionally talented team. Elsa Pooley, author of best-selling field guides to trees and wild flowers, is a self-taught botanical artist and amateur botanist. She pursued her passion for indigenous plants through collecting herbarium specimens, researching, writing, growing and painting plants. She currently divides her time between
This February marks my parents’ 48th wedding anniversary and my 20th and suddenly we realise that we must be grown up and middle aged. Add to this shock is the realisation that we have had the same jobs for almost 19 years! That’s so stable and boring and, so last year… we are not the
Rain hampered walks, but contrary to popular belief it does sometimes stop. That’s the moment to get out birding for the obvious reason that the birds have also been waiting for this moment. Something of a mystery is how small birds are able to emerge perfectly dry. About the best place to stand and wait
Dear Friends Summer is in full force in February. Fabulous sunshine, burning bright skies and the occasional thunderstorm to cool us down. February is not only a hot month it is also the month of loving and appreciating and caring. We come from a line of very practical hoteliers and it is only in digging
Mid-summer is a minor lull in the bird world, and not just in Africa. The most obvious feature is the slackening of bird-song. Territorial boundaries have been settled, and the most important thing is collecting lots of food for chicks. So it is at the Cavern. In an admittedly very wet weekend there was neither
There is no question about the fact that we are Hill Billies. We do try to put on our town attire when we head out. We keep our shoulders back and walk tall as we head into the bustling streets but sometimes the fancifulness of the big smoke outsmarts us all. A while back, we
This week I have had to do a lot of reading. I find this to be a hugely difficult task and my brain and body feel completely drained by the end of the day. The trickiest part is comparing documents and making sure there are no contradictions and that all the sentences are concise, clear
