I was just starting to venture out and explore places again and then we were locked down in Melbourne for the second time. Oh the freedoms we take for granted!

I recently headed off on the deadly treddley to meet an Instagram friend. It felt a bit like a blind date or an internet date. We’d only chatted over Instagram, we liked similar things, lived on the same side of town and decided to meet, with cameras, at Heide. It was so nice to sit and have a coffee, with the now social distancing and sanitising lotion for the hands a familiar ritual. In Day 3 now of the second Covid-19 Stage 3 lockdown, sitting at a coffee shop is one of the simple pleasures I’m missing greatly.

The 16 acre Heide grounds In Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, contain an art museum, a cafe, heritage-listed gardens and a sculpture park. It includes the original home of John and Sunday Reed and a rich history of Australian Art and Culture. On this day I visited the cafe and strolled through the Kitchen Garden and the Wild Garden around the original homestead. There’s much more to see and it’s well worth a visit when Melbourne opens up to outings again. https://www.heide.com.au/

The walled garden which is delightful in other seasons, didn’t have a lot happening in winter, so we headed up to the house and the kitchen garden. It was a hum of activity with staff and volunteers catching up on a back log of weeding and mulching after being isolated and the kitchen closed. Part of the garden is undergoing a reconstruction so it will be interesting to see the changes we can get back out again.

We chatted to Alice, pictured below, who works in the Kitchen Garden and had lots of interesting bits of information to share. I mentioned that my brother was into Veggie Gardening in Toowoomba, Qld, and has his own YouTube channel and my Mum was an avid ornamental gardener and as I currently don’t have access to a garden I live vicariously by photographing other peoples gardens.

My partner Steve mentioned trying to get a community led conservation type program happening in our neighbourhood but the local council doesn’t provide any support to set it up or coordinate it, so Alice mentioned guerrilla gardening, where locals band together and just do what needs to be done. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes!

The Kitchen Garden supplies fresh produce to the Cafe so eventually we wandered back down and enjoyed a delicious Calamari lunch with a glass of wine. Everything is closed again now for at least 6 weeks of Covid-19 Stage 3 Lockdown. But oh, how nice will it be when we can get out and about again!