Annie Get Your Gum (Leaf)

Frocks & Frou Frou  Frocks & Frou Frou Frocks & Frou Frou Frocks & Frou Frou

Top: Michy Lou

Cardigan: Gorman

Skirt: Asos

Shoes: Chie Mihara

Boy oh boy, where did the last fortnight go? I’m sorry to be so absent – not even replying to comments or anything. All cylinders in my Real Life™ are firing at the moment, and the blog’s falling a little behind as a result. It’s a good thing – it’s a happy-making thing – but it does mean that I have less time for writing!

It’s been a whirlwind of a month so far; I’ve been jetting all over the country doing staff appraisals, my parents have been to stay, and I’ve had a lot on over the weekends too. It’s been a good end to the year, if an abrupt one. We’re – oh God – just over a month from Christmas, and I’m feeling spectacularly unprepared. Gone are my carefully planned present-buying spreadsheets. my tree, my stash of wrapping paper. I’m flying by the seat of my pants this year. I’ve been to a few of the pre-Christmas markets (and true to form have managed to find more for myself than for other people)

I was in Canberra for a wedding a month or so ago, and while I was my sister and I visited the (outstanding!) Canberra Handmade market. While we were browsing I spotted this lovely brooch taken from a cast of a gum leaf and a pair of gumnuts, and I loved it so much Mae bought it for me as an early Christmas present. I’m preeeetty sure it came from Ricardo Pewter.

Frocks & Frou Frou

When I was a kid I used to think that the Australian wildlife was so desperate looking. I craved rolling green hills, hedgerows, fields of bluebells, and I couldn’t understand my Mum’s affinity for our straggly, dry, native flora. As an adult though I love it. I love the scent of eucalyptus, the particular olives and golds of the Australian landscape, trees with resilient leaves, secretive blossoms, and rugged seed pods and nuts that need the kiss of bushfire just to fruit.

 

20 thoughts on “Annie Get Your Gum (Leaf)

  1. If it is from Ricardo Pewter, they have a lovely pair of reasonably priced earrings (on their website) that would totally match that brooch. <3

  2. Beautiful brooch! I always enjoy your posts about Australian flora and landscapes 🙂 sounds like things are really good with you at present – yay!

  3. I moved from Minnesota (very green and lush – and COLD!) to Arizona almost 19 years ago and thought the landscape and plants were darn ugly. I thought everything was brown and drab and boring. Now that I have lived here a while, I see more colors (there are zillions of shades of brown and light green!), I see textures that don’t exist anywhere else (spiky plants, horned toads!), and I see beauty. Just like all people have their own beauty, so do all landscapes.

    Always glad to see a post from you pop up. 🙂

    1. Hey Christie, it’s funny how a familiar landscape works it’s magic on your heart, isn’t it? There’s a particular hue to the light in Australia that’s just so painfully familiar to me – I’m glad I’ve learned to recognise the beauty in it.

          1. Very cute, Chel! I saw it in store a week or so ago – it’s lovely. I don’t think $100 is too much at all… But then I’m probably a shopping addict!

          2. Ordered the skirt this morning, and I just got a notification – skirt shipped to me already. Yay! 🙂

            And yes, you’re probably a shopping addict, but which girl isn’t? 🙂

  4. It’s darling, good call on the early gifting 🙂 I’ve bought everyones gifts already but no doubt will keep adding little ‘just because’ gifts for another month, just because 🙂

  5. It’s an acquired taste, the Australian landscape. And you are right, I do love such things as the blue-greys of the eucalypts with their open crowns and straight pale trunks. Plus the hot red bottlebrush flowers of callistemons and the spare, sere, bleached grasses of the limestone plains. Among other things. I really like that brooch, especially the little holes. The leaves on our spotted gums have exactly those sort of holes.

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