Make your home merry and bright
CHRISTMAS ISA LOVELY time to spend athomeand brightening the inside and outside up with beautiful flowers pots and hanging baskets is such a fun thing to do.
The festive time of year always seems to comearound far too fast and the olderwe get the quicker it comes— so there is no time to waste.
Let’s start on the inside. These dayswehave a huge range of extremely long lasting indoor plants available. You can select from those with lovely foliage like calatheas, ficus, peace lilies, palms and scheflerra all very easy to care for.
Or you can go for something that is bright and flowering. The world’s most popular house plant, phalaenopsis orchids are stunning! Poinsettias are a sign of Christmas andnow dayswehave cream and pink marbled poinsettias as well as the traditional big bright reds. They will last for months on end and give you plenty of colour.
Flowering kalanchoes and anthuriums are also choice for inside and let’s not forget the stunning and deliciously
Don’t forget to hang some flowering baskets around. fragrant Christmas lilies!
For outside, you can get inventive and pot up amyriad of different flowering plants into containers, hanging baskets, flower towers, old boots, even wheelbarrows to create an impact. Try red and white petunias, begonias or impatiens, or drifts of geraniums. Roses can be plunged into pots at the front door and fuchsias or hydrangeas make a great colour splash in the shady places. Long flowering sunpatiens are fantastic too.
Don’t forget to hang some flowering baskets around the barbecue, patio or courtyard. A great idea is to plant up herbs into hanging baskets or pots and use them at barbecue time and then take them on holiday with you!
As there is notmuchtime before all those Christmas visitors turn up, it is best to get plants that are already flowering if you want to have a good display. Wehave baskets already to go and a myriad of other goodies! If you get onto all thisnow then you will have more time to relax before the really silly season begins, so comeout and select some colour for your home.
Into theunknown: Thesecret Wwidiary of Kiwi Alick Trafford
Byian Trafford, Penguin Randomhouse, $38
.. .. .. .. ..
.. .. Hewasn’t supposed to keep a diary, but Kiwi soldieralick Trafford carried his throughout World War I.
It wasn’t ever supposed to see the light of day, Alick’s sonharvey had been told find and burn them.
Fortunately he didn’t, and the frank and raw words of this 22-year-old soldier have made it back from the trenches to give us a first-hand look at life at the front. It’s a great read, wellwritten and in places so startling you’ll have to re-read passages.
“What sadness there will be innewzealand. Our casualties are enormous – thousands of goodmenkilled or wounded in four hours [at Passchendaele]. My good Hornchurch convalescence mate, George Knight, was killed. Twobrothersnow gone. Tonightwe get a change of socks.”
Ian, his grandson, has done a great job in turning this into a gripping story – rotting bodies, wet, cold men, interspersed with stories of life in the French countryside where there’s a bath and a bed to sleep in.
This is life as real as it gets, 100 years on.
— Lindathompson