Do you always seem to have one plant that flowers a little longer or first before others?
For the past few years, mine has been Gardenia and I know why.
She is a Spiritual focus in my little Urban Garden and that focus has provided a very deep connection with Nature which let's the conversation in the Language of Flowers flow between us.
I am presenting
'Urban Garden Magic ~ Healing & Guidance with Nature'
a free 45 min presentation at 11:30am next Friday, Saturday & Sunday
at Sydney Mind Body Spirit Festival Australia
and your personal flower & plant connection & ways to future your relationship with Nature through it. is one of the topics we will be exploring together. I hope you can join me!
More details about the festival, my presentation and all the wonderful other workshops & events, can be found at this link:
http://www.mbsfestival.com.au
Cheralyn Darcey
www.cheralyndarcey.com
#mbsfestival
#flowerreadingcards
#floramancy
Nature Adventures
21 May 2015
10 December 2014
Flora's Wonderful Wishing Tea
Good Morning!
I hope your day is going to be rather wonderful and here is a Wishing Tea that you can create to bring a little extra boost to you or someone you know. Thank you bunches for all the messages asking for MORE of my Flower friend (I think she's called FLORA!) Next year, I'll be sharing a bit more of her but i am very over deadline with a few things right now so I need to clear the decks first.
It really does make my heart happy to see her bringing joy to others.
May Nature Bless you with all that you seek & need my friends! xx
*ensure you only use food grade ingredients & that you are allergy responsible and aware.
*Sharing my journal pages and even printing them out is ok BUT you must not alter them or use them in any other way except for personal enjoyment. NO commercial use. They are protected under copyright.
27 November 2014
Plant Native Flowers Please! :)
Good Morning!
Here is a great activity, check out your local council for advice on what is native in plants to YOUR actual area and plant THAT!
Another very important thing is to look after our Native Bees. Planting native flowers is one way, and also think about keeping native bees (introduced bees take the pollen from our natives). They don't produce much honey, true, BUT lots are stingless (bonus!) and they are under serious threat.
This is where to buy them in Australia if you are interested PLUS it's a great site with loads of information and again, ask your local council for more information.
http://www.aussiebee.com.au/buy-stingless-bees.html
Have a fantastic day! xx
21 October 2014
The Bloody Long Walk
Well we did it!
After 5 weeks of bronchitis and not being able to do the level of training and lost the weight I had hoped and I envisioned, I found myself on the starting line nervous, fearful and with not a whole lot of hope at all.
Yes, had thought of pulling out BUT people had sponsored me and I knew that the money and the support for awareness were so needed and you know what? I am not a quitter! Even if I didn't finish I was going to give this my very best shot.
The most I had even walked in training or an event was 13.6 km the week before. Before that 10km.
Now I kidded myself all week as did everyone I know with comments like, "Oh you have done retail/restaurant, barwork! You would of walked that far and more in a day" AND "Come on you backpacked last year in UK and Europe!"
Let me tell you all these comments? The ones I even made myself? Total and utterly WRONG!
It wasnt my level of fitness or lack of preparation. Other that the bout of bronchitis and the extra padding I have at the moment, I'm actually very cardio fit.
It is a mental challenge probably more than physical.
To walk for that distance, and it took us over 7 hours, is mentally challenging. If you are in anyway in any doubt you will finish, every sharper twinge in a muscle, evey miss step on a bush path, every puffed out cliff climb, YOU WILL DOUBT YOURSELF and you will do the math and think you cant take too many more of THOSE moments.
ENJOY IT! I only listened to music for the last 10km. It was more built up by that time and busy on the route with sun-seekers. I was also starting to really hurt physically and I did find it harder to focus. For me, and it may be different for others, I'm not judging here, but for me, I really enjoyed the silence. Well there was lots of bird song, ocean sounds and the occasional snippets of conversation from walkers we passed or were passed by, but I was in my own little world and on this route, the views where spectacular!
I thought A LOT during that time. I planned things with my art and writing, my life even. I wasn't;t focusing things, just thinking and day dreaming in a way. The rhythmic nature of walking brought a calmness to my mind. Oh except for the hills! :) But even those gave a dimension to the whole mental process. Feeling accomplishment after each set brought a surge of pride of accomplishment and happiness.
On this Walk ~ THE HILLS!!
I live in this area and have lived in Taylors Point, Avalon and now Frenchs Forest so I know the route incredibly well. Why didn't I remember all those hills??" The Palm Beach steps which i know well, were forgotten in my lead up and WOW those are JUST what you need to get the race started! :D
Putting one foot in front of the other for 35km HURTS YOUR FEET!
The souls of your feet may be on fire! Change socks lots but even then by about the 25km you will think you are walking on hot cement. You need to focus on other things and do not stop! Stopping makes your feet swell I think and makes it worse.
Play the Game your Way.
I went with The Admiral, he found it very monotonous. I actually found it very relaxing and enjoyable mentally up until about the 20th km. We stopped talking with each other at about the 10km mark. I stopped interacting as he was grumpy, his advice to me wasn't what I wanted to do (listen to music, drink a gatorade, NOT STOP FOR BREAKS!) Ok I never got those breaks, he was intent on finishing as fast as possible to get it over with. I had planned on three 15min full breaks. It wasn't going to happen and I didn't want to argue. Play the game your way? I had to watch his body language too, he wasn't happy, so I blocked him out and formed my own mental picture of the event. I walked in front of him and pretended I was alone. You need to be able to very quickly focus on getting your mental state clear if your partner/team mates are not playing the way that is working for you!
Finishing feels AMAZING.
like anything in life, when you work REALLY hard, don't take short cuts or have things handled to you on a plate, the victory is so damn sweet!
Two days later and I'm STILL smiling to myself and thinking '35km!!!!!!'
Now I know I have a long way to go on my fitness journey but this was proof to me that I still have it in me to achieve and to succeed. Things are a lot harder now as I spend A LOT of time these days on my butt writing and creating. Walking 35km in 7 and half hours through that hilly terrain has convinced me that it's all possible.
It wasn't just about ME!
This was a fund raising event and I am so grateful too those who sponsored not only me but everyone who took part. I raised $440 and ranked 174 out of 1,000 participants so not feeling so bad about that! Overall the event has now raised over $2 million in much needed funds into research.
What is the Event for?
"Mitochondrial disease (mito) is a debilitating genetic disorder that robs the body’s cells of energy, causing multiple organ dysfunction or failure and potentially death.
Mito can affect both children and adults; due to its genetic basis, the disease often affects multiple family members. The prognosis for children diagnosed with Mito is often dire with severe lifestyle impediments and significantly reduced life expectancy.
Initially thought to be a rare disease (affecting less than 1 in 20,000 people), with advances in genetic medicine it is now recognised as affecting 1 in 200 people (over 100,000 Australians), with 1 in 5,000 suffering a severe or life-threatening form of the disease. Those with mild or no symptoms are unknowingly at risk of passing the disease on to their children."
for more information:
http://www.bloodylongwalk.com.au/sydney/about-mito/
Next Year?
Yes I WILL be doing it next year and if you want to join me I think putting a team together would be wonderful. Start training. I know that I was able to do (and tough) without enough training so with it, YOU CAN DO IT!
12 October 2014
Nature Artist Trading Card Collective Group
My contibution to the September Nature ATC Collective "Tree Hugger" Themed Swap!
'Jacaranda Lake' ATC lino print & paint on canvas board 3.5 x 2.5 inches
If YOU would like to join in and swap Nature themed Artist Trading Cards, you are invited to join our Facebook group.
You can join in any swap, there is no obligation if you are a member, just join in when you can. NO SKILL LEVEL is required, just a love of Nature and a desire to try your hand at creativity. people do rubber stamping, collage, photography, painting, drawing, ANYTHING.
This is a fantastic way to also grow a miniature art collection. We have a lot of fun and its a lovely friendly non competitive encouraging group. Lots of people join the group and watch for a while before diving into a swap. There are files with links so you can learn more and the group members are very friendly and helpful if you want to learn more....
The group link is here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/natureatccollective/
Blushwood Tree
Nature YOU are awesome!
I know this flower and it is such an interesting story appearing in the news this week
Blushwood Tree ~ Hylandia dockrillii
Flowers~
Scientists have discovered the berry of the Blushwood Tree found in Far North Queensland has amazing cancer-fighting properties.
"The berry comes from the blushwood tree (Hylandia dockrillii), which is a rainforest-dwelling variety known for centuries by local indigenous communities as having fast-acting medicinal properties. Now a drug has been manufactured using a compound found in the berry, and it’s so far been used on 300 animals, including cats, dogs, horses, and Tasmanian devils, who were afflicted with different kinds of superficial tumours."
The full article can be found here:
ABC NEWS ARTICLE
It is fascinating to me when Science proves the Nature Wisdom we hold within us.
As a Flower Reader I would say LOOK AT THOSE FLOWERS!!!!!!
The energies and possibilities the flower may hold is right there in those images.
This is known as the Doctrine of Signatures, The Language of Nature or Nature wisdom.
I can not help but look at the plant and see the white cups, the tumorous lesion looking buds, the tilt of the petals, the berry formation qualities. The language is written all over her form.
Well it will be an interesting plant to watch and see what will happen through these modern trial.
Personally, I am seeing and feeling the connection to the quick resolution of issues. Turning things around. Upending dramas. The emptying out of the last of something.
I shall continue working with this flower this week.
As to us all working with this flower energetically, I would be so interested in hearing what you feel too at this stage if you are reading flowers, working with flower and plant essences.
Please let me know.
16 July 2014
Nature Work Keeps Going......
The release of my first general publication the "Australian Wildflower Reading Cards" Rockpool publishing September 2014 is just about to happen and having an advance copy in my hands is a physical realisation of a long held and hard worked at dream.
It has been a very long journey and even once I was given my contract and even though I had already completed the Deck, it is still nearly a year long publishing process to go from artwork and manuscript to a publication in a bookstore.
This whole past year I have continued working on two books focused on my work with Nature, a non fiction and a fiction book and a smaller work of Flowers. Ahhhh and The Decks! I have another three decks in various stages of completion as well and it is a monumental task to create the artworks and to write the manuscripts for each. Especially so as I work in a fairly decent size in lino and wood block printing. I also paint these prints in my much adored gouache, another very slow process that involves building up layers of glazes.
My writing involves a lot of research of the Botanical Sciences and cultural, historical and mythological studies. To bring it down to a page in Guidebook is days, weeks, sometimes months of work. I do this alongside the creation of each artwork.
My fine art focus is to deconstruct what my eyes see to get to the spiritual center of what my heart feels and what my study and research illuminates for me to produce these images and that is not something I can do sitting in front of a computer screen or studio easel. I have created a little nook in my garden that is Sydney Winter friendly to sit and write and create in and I do as much in the Field as is possible.
Even though I have travelled and lived throughout the world, there are some places I haven't been to of course. These flowers in place have been a challenge so this has involved extra consultation, research and work to ensure complete authenticity in bringing them into my Decks.
There is no Flower or Plant that I haven't experienced the presence of in my work.
Here are a few images from upcoming decks for you to enjoy now.......
All ~ 21 x 30cm
wood block print in ink on recycled paper & gouache
May Nature Always Bless You with all that You Need!
Cheralyn xx
11 July 2014
07 July 2014
Nature Mentors & Inspirations
I have been inspired since I was a child by the early Botanists.
My heroes where those on the tall ships and pack horse trails, those who tagged along, had other 'duties', or perhaps even lead the expeditions, who collected, drew and wrote about the natural surrounds of their adventures. talking about and sharing Nature with friends last year
I do remember my first spark of wonderment. It was while as a very young child in a classroom learning about the exploration of a land, a teacher passed around familiar xerox smelling sheets of paper the toner fluid overpowering my senses. This time, instead of the usual pictures of uniformed men offering trinkets or horses overloaded with saddlebags of shovels, ships sitting in harbours with rowboats heading for beaches in coves, I had before me faded pages from diaries.
Arthur Bowes Smyth journal
Looking around the classroom I couldn't work out why the usual babble of my classmates hadn't halted in the same way my world had stopped in this epiphany. Beautiful line drawings of leaves curved around words, delicate flowers overlapping each other to use all available space on a page while nodding to each other over the prose, the very first observations of the person who had sat with them. though I usually sketch while out in Nature, sometimes the plants I grow or are gifted to me are an inspiration
I became lost in the school library and then the local one as absorbed the world of the early Botanists.
If you ask if I thought I would be an Artist when I was a child, the answer is not really, I wanted to be an Explorer! It wasn't the travel, it was to have gone on a great expedition with journals and my mind to fill with the world as painted by Nature there.
I will scribble, quickly take notes & thoughts as I sketch, sometimes around my subject, sometimes on separate pages and even rubbish I've collected on my way, whatever is handy! My journals are messy, stuck together, joyous collections of my journey.
As a teenager, Science Fiction became my friend, of course it did, because here WAS an unexplored place and as read the tales of Asimov, Clarke and so on, I put myself on these worlds, capturing the plants, the creatures, the terrain, perhaps just for myself but recorded in sketches and in snippets of thoughts in a cloth-bound book tucked in my spacesuit somehow.
Star Trek or Star Wars.... COME ON.... what do you think????
"Space: the final frontier......... "Ellis Rowan is my hero... my hikes, my adventures, my walks, are nothing at all compared to the bravery and the dedication of Ellis but she inspires me in so many ways through everything I do in my life.
BUT I was also very much lost also in a world that, to this day, is the heart of all that I do. The early Botanists. Their names to me are old friends, the pages of their precious journals contain the poetry that warms my soul and lights my imagination. Ellis Rowan, Louisa Anne Meredith, Flora Martin, Jane Colden, ...... theses are just four of the women who's stories, journals, artworks and sketches I still love, adore and admire greatly. None, as much as Ellis Rowan. Louisa Anne Meredith
My Messages from Nature postcards and books that I create from my sketchbook drawings & notes, featuring my writing and poetry are inspired by her work and my early childhood memories of reading this book in particular. Most Australians know the importance of this
"Some of my Bush Friends in Tasmania" as it is Australia's first published book of poetry one of my early journal entries
On travelling and living overseas I found the worlds of Jane Colden, Alice Lounsberry, Marianne North and as I read their stories, stood in their worlds and looked out, I thought that though I could never be as they had, there was other work, to connect the old world and the new world together.
I was more interested in the actual meanings of the Flowers and Plants, of the things that they held unto themselves and recording those elements as best as I could. postcard that I created with a sketch & notes I created on my of my hikes ~ more are here:
Messages from Nature: Postcards to share
That is the adventure I am on today.
I am out in the field and I am researching Nature's Blessings in their place and capturing in my journals the energy, the messages and the beauty of Nature as I find them. I know I will never discover a new plant but I hope, through the inspiration of those who I admire so greatly for their bravery in the field, in their defiance of societies expectations and in their love and dedication of Nature that I will attain a greater and deeper understanding of the connection between us all is and how not only it can help us but we can help it.
I am thankful, I am grateful and I always acknowledge the great works and the inspirations I have found in the work of these my mentors. They have taught me to research, to learn the value of adventure be it in my own backyard or across the world. They have put a fire in my heart to never give up, to respect nature and to really listen to what she is saying to us all.
May Nature Always Provide You with All that you Need! xx
Reading List:
"The Flower Hunter" Ellis Rowan
"The Flower Hunter: The Remarkable Life of Ellis Rowan" Morton-Evans, Christine & Michael
"Good Observers of Nature" Tina Gianquitto
"Ginger for Pluck" Carter & Cross
30 June 2014
George's Heights ~ Fuchsia & Cannon Balls
The Admiral is fond of saying that if it wasn't for the Australian Military, the just about pristine bushland around our harbour would of been lost last century.
The Army and Navy have in fact looked after and preserved great tracks of land since settlement and I often say this to great shock but seriously, think about it! Look at the rest of say, Balmoral and Mosman, that my friends is what places like Middle Harbour and Georges Heights would look like today if the the Navy and the Army had not of had their installations there!
I'm not saying it's been a perfect relationship AT ALL, but I would rather have most of the bushland preserved than leveled.
I am so lucky as I've already had over 25 years of access to these places but now the Military has given giving back most areas to public access via the Harbour Foreshore Trust and rest assured that though they still hold smaller areas, it is cared for with incredible dedication to preserving the environment.
I remember 20 plus years ago attending Ships Balls and staying overnight at HMAS Penguin and being an early riser, creeping out to wander about the scrub while watching the sunrise with my sketchbook and drawing the banksia, the lemon bottle brush, fuchsia heath and delighting in the chatter of the black cockatoos and whip bird chorus.
Sometimes a wallably would be finding it's way home, stopping by the mess for the fruit left out by the cook and would regard me I suppose as curious in my civvies.
All this wild nature right in the middle of Australia's busiest and biggest city.
(Black Cockatoos this weekend!)
On weekends we would often bring our young children to 'The Base' and then go for bush walks and picnics. Alone, no Rangers, no one to share the trails and tracks. We would sit up high on the cliff tops overlooking The Sydney Harbour Heads, watching the spinnakers and dolphins for hours.
The kids loved exploring the old Forts and we still do today. I feel like I'm in an episode of the Walking Dead at times as I walk within the corridoors of sandstone and concrete, of bars and rusty metal, not wanting to look around the bend!
Nature has taken over and silenced the area as many buildings and shapes seem to have become modern day lost temples within the bush.
We often return there now and did so this weekend. Now, open to the Public, we share the area with young families and tourists, with locals out jogging or enjoying the fresh air. It's more accessible in so many ways with marked tracks and information boards, but still the Admiral spins his warries about diving in the areas below and shares with me, and anyone who shares our trail!, the history and the fun facts about the area.
This weekend we met a Ranger. The Admiral and I are still arguing about his name! I think it is Phil, he thinks it's Dave! We shall find out next time. He was very helpful in sharing with me areas of flowering Wildflowers and it was interesting to see which plants had been selected for regeneration in a few sections. He had also unearthed.... CANNON BALLS! The Admiral was in blokey heaven :)
We got an invitation to come back with Ranger Awesome to his office to see the Cannon Balls from 1850 and the tin box that they where found in.
A few of the Flowers I Found:
Fuchsia Heath
CLARITY
Flannel Flower
CALM
The Guardian of the Rock
CLEANSING
Lemon Bottlebrush
This Flower was so powerful and zinging as the photo reveled.
UPLIFT
GUESS! (yes it's a trick question!)
TO GET THERE:
http://www.harbourtrust.gov.au/visit/georges-heights-headland-park