These are shots of taken from around Ballarat and from within my home, also in Ballarat. They're pertinent here, I'm feel, because they point to an aesthetic that guides my gardening and is embodied in my gardening, as well as it guides everything I do, or like to do, and is embodied within these, I hope to say.
I say this while near at hand and at ear someone or some more than one is or are using a whipper snipper and a lawn mower. 
I refrain from using machinery wherever possible, believing that machinery somehow injures the world.
Many will disagree, saying that such is the way of the world. But I will dig my heels in. I like it quiet. I like that a garden opens itself to whoever wants to be there, that it's not to be approached as if it were in need of militant control. 
Well, yeah, militancy may be required when dealing with prickly customers. But does militancy need to be employed as a final solution? A garden is about breathing, about space, about feeling unrestrained, yet safe. The whipper-snipperers and mowers are continuing. I sit at my desk dazed and Zara is concerned, to say the least.
What's it all about, that we have to employ machinery, of the loud and ruthless variety, in those spaces we regard, or as I regard, as refuges? I'd prefer it if they hadn't been invented. Oh, yes, I'm being unrealistic. But is something more real just because it's more insistent? I will never believe so. It's getting semi-quiet, in the aftermath. Some of the unheard birds are starting to be heard again. Zara's waiting to be taken outside for walkies.
In my home, here, as much as in my garden, I like to let nature take its course. There's something about machinery I find unnatural. The piece of bark, above, I found recently, took its tree a hundred or two years to make, without machinery. It happened without loud noise, without intrusion, unquickly. So what's got into everybody that only machinery will make things happen? And why does everything have to happen quickly? We've been around long enough to know that time takes forever.
