July      

 A few years ago my daughter taught me how to do linocuts.  

I tried it and did first a little simple flower. 

I wanted to do some more. I thought pictures with flowers would be nice, stories with flowers would be a good theme. 

I remembered a Dreamtime story I read long ago, Girraween. It is about a brave man who, after all the flowers had disappeared from earth, brought back the flowers for the people. 

And then more flower stories came to mind. 

An old Chinese woman carrying water in a cracked pot and flowers grew along the side of the path where the water leaked.

A poem by Goethe we learned in school about a flower being trampled down and passed away smiling

A poem by Wordsworth about dreaming of flowers he had admired when he was wandering some time ago.  

Remembering walking along the streets of a war-torn city and seeing a flower coming up among among the rubble.

A ballade by Henry Lawson praising the beauty of the bush.

I coloured the flowers in by hand. 

Later I turned the linocut prints and stories, 11 in all, into a little book for our children and called it ‘Flower Power’.