A gardening book with a difference. A book about connecting to the energies of our surroundings as something natural. The humble garden waits out there to join with introducing wellness as something to achieve when living within surroundings that are balanced in their natural energies and nature caressed in its yin yang. A relationship thing.

Feng Shui gardening with a difference. A nature gardening experience.

Wanderings of a Lost Australian relays something of a personal journey experiencing a period of despondency and depression while trying to find work as a town planner slowly replaced finding connection with nature through the garden using Feng Shui in landscape. I landscaped display villages for Beechwood Homes on the South Coast, Sydney, and Central Coast.

I left my family of four children purposely living on some land just outside of Terara on the New South Wales South Coast. I set up an inground Canary Island Date Palm plantation and built a shed to live in while tending to the palms. The verses relay what was happening in my life and surroundings. A wanderer in ‘life’ disjointed and finding harmony in something different. The verses are truly Australian and cover a period from 1996 to 2003. They relay something of an everyday Australian life.

A journey and acceptance of the ‘spirit of a place’ is in everything. Each radiating its energy and everything has a connection to what surrounds it.

There is a spiritual pathway to connect with and absorb something of nature. It can be in our backyard or landscape, and I thought about places where humans and harmony co-exist, and the spirits of those places wait to come and meet with their users.

I took a journey to realise the spirit is in the place, the place is within its spirit. A travelogue with a difference.

A thought-provoking book about technology insidiously infiltrating out lives and leading us from living within the bounds of the earth. We are being led into a world of human creation. A severing of our yin life to image that of a yang life. The drift to cities, urbanization and technology girding us within its grasp.

A journey to Bali, Sri Lanka and Laos, finding places and people still connected to the earth and realising they are slowly being caught within a process fostering progression and capturing the human spirit.

A discussion about our connection to the earth.

Vagrant Moods of Spirit and Energy relay something of a personal journey finding harmony in nature and within everyday surroundings. I was tuning myself to join with nature. The topics convey my interpretation of yin yang transition as they relate to the energies and spirit of the land.

A background in Feng Shui gardening led to an acceptance energy and yin yang are natural parts of our surroundings and there to attach with for mental stability and connection. I was learning to join with the spirits and energy of my surroundings.

I’m a Wollongong boy, born July 16, 1945, on the day the world welcomed the nuclear age. It went one way and I went another. Born into a dairy farming family of Nowra, schooling away, working for my family on their farms until finally offered a partnership with my dad to buy an island in the Shoalhaven River. Farming life on my own slowly converting to horticulture, nurseryman and gardener. My gardening genes were no doubt handed to me from my mother’s family. They were good genes.

I ended up living in a shed on an inground Canary Island Date Palm plantation I established at Terara up the road from the original family farm. I landscaped exhibition villages for project builder, Beechwood Homes and became conversant in Feng Shui for garden design.

I found a form of harmony living close to nature and accepting its bounds. A story of transition from that of naivety with the land to becoming a partner with its mystic ways.

66 Ways came about recalling ideas discussing sustainable practice in the garden after working with the land and garden for fifty years or so. I gathered the ideas onto pads and they added up to 66. That seemed appropriate.

66 Ways really offers an introduction about the scope and brevity of gardening. Plants, birdlife, insects, and ‘life’ itself form part of the garden, and they all seek sustainability. It’s a natural thing. Our task as gardeners is to provide a home so all within are content and happy. That becomes the reward for sustainability.