Sometimes Australia can feel very far from Italy and other parts of Europe where my family are from, yet at times, the distance and years can fall away in a moment. This morning, I noticed dandelions have sprung up in the backyard and decided to pick some of their fresh, young leaves for lunch. (Nothing fancy, just to add to a sandwich among other salad greens.) Unexpectedly, this simple foraging in the backyard with sunshine on my back also brought a warmth of connection. Not only to the garden but to great-granny Maddalena and the hillsides near Fossa in Abruzzo where she’d forage for greens and carry them home in her apron. (How different her life must’ve felt when she emigrated to the other side of the world aged forty-eight!)
In Australia, she planted an extensive vegie patch in her garden amid those other plants that spring up around a backyard. Like dandelions and nodding tops, the cobblers pegs that got stuck in my ankle socks when I’d run past them as a child, or the prickles when I was barefoot. All of them edible (even the leaves of the prickly one, but not the prickles). An old-fashioned garden, where the lawn wasn’t always mown to within an inch of its life.
I know great-granny Maddalena had a lot more manual daily work to do, especially in the first half of the 20th century in Italy. That her life was often challenging and sacrifices had to be made, yet my strongest memories of her are of her smiling. Her face all creased beautifully as she did. (That said, I also remember she and Nonno Anni yelling at each other in rapid Italian and I’d not be sure if they were fighting or just talking!)
As the world ‘speeds up’ and seems to get more complicated, I’m finding more often I’m seeking out those simpler things – little parts in a day that can bring a few moments of warmth or connection, a kind memory, a smile. Even if it’s just some sun on my face when I’ve been at my desk for hours and not realised just how lovely and sunshiny it is outside that day. Or the lively taste of some dandelion greens in amongst an everyday sandwich. 💛🌿
* Photos – (apologies for the older ones not being as clear!) – Great-granny in her garden/ the dandelion leaves I foraged today/ a marmalade hoverfly (great pollinators and garden friends!) on a dandelion in my backyard/ a photo I took many years ago while wandering the hillsides near Fossa, Abruzzo.
On the kitchen table today… pickings from the garden – ginger flowers, white periwinkles that self-sowed in a cement crack, a spotted blackberry lily from a lovely friend’s cutting, a native, blue flax lily, the bleeding heart (was one of Grandma Lorna’s favourites), tiny, yellow flowers from bok choy gone to seed, even a cobbler’s peg flower. 
After some thought, the recipe I couldn’t go past is, Maccheroni alla chitarra with wild greens. I’ve known this dish from when I was a little girl, have cooked and eaten it in both Italy and Australia and it has ties to my Abruzzo ancestry going back more than 600 years. It’s also a lovely connection to Bisnonna Maddalena and Nonno Anni recalling her foraging for wild greens on hillsides around Fossa and carrying them in her apron back to the kitchen. (‘Maccheroni’ is the original Abruzzese name used for this dish, while in Italy’s north where maccheroni is a short pasta, it’s called ‘spaghetti alla chitarra’.)
Left to themselves, the basil and parsley I planted when summer began have been relishing the rain and heat and are on a rampage to take over the vegie patch in the backyard. No fertiliser or pesticides, just tucked under the protection of netting propped up by an old mop handle (a nod to Nonno Anni!) 
On the kitchen table today… olive twigs from the backyard. I planted this olive tree as a sapling with Nonno Anni, almost twenty years ago now, one March on San Giuseppe day (Italian Father’s day), and it’s stayed a lovely connection to him and, of course, Italy. That said, it’s never given one single olive in Brisbane’s subtropical humidity 😄 but it seems happy and its leaves are a beautiful pale green. (With many health benefits too – I’ve discovered a sprig of olive leaves can be added to soups, stews and even to the water used to boil pasta! Might give it a go and see.)
I never expected to end up with a collection of linens that span four generations of women on both sides of my family. Especially since, as a teenager, I’d hope for the latest record for my birthday only to be disappointed when Nanna Francesca gave me tablecloths ‘for my Glory box’. Again. For years these sat unused along with the tea towels, doilies and other items I also had no interest in then.
Like magic, these iris flowers bloom in different parts of my garden all on the same day, and the next day, they’re gone. Fleeting, magical, beautiful. 😊💜✨️ (Love their tiger markings too!)
The elderly woman who lived here before me left behind a terracotta pot of crocus she’d planted. At the time, the plant just looked to me like thick grass, for I was very new to gardening then with much to learn (an ongoing process!)
I’m still trying to get through it and have lost being able to taste and smell, (devastating to someone who loves cooking!) but I’m hoping these will return in time – fingers crossed. And I also still hold hope for this fresh, new year.
With much going on with the book coming out, I haven’t been able to get into the garden for a while and suddenly noticed out the window that the hippeastrum (centre) has flowered (exciting to me as it’s looked half-dead for a long while and I didn’t expect a recovery, especially with my past bad experiences trying to grow flowers!)
On the kitchen table today… a friend’s home-grown lemons and mandarins on one of Nanna Francesca’s 1950s dinner plates. So lovely when someone brings you fruit and flowers they’ve grown in their garden. To me they’re the perfect gifts. (And the fresh, crisp lemon scent currently in the kitchen is divine!) 🍋
Zoe xx
I planted these in the vegie patch to attract bees yet the flowers have taken me straight back to the daisy bushes Nanna Francesca grew in her front garden. She often had us stand in front of those daisy bushes for photos and from the 1950s on, we have decades of family photos taken with the daisies. (I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has old photos taken in front of a certain plant or tree in a family garden over the years!) While those daisies are long gone now, I love how daisies will forever remind me of Nanna Francesca. (I also couldn’t resist including the photo of Bisnonno Vitale watering their front garden back when three generations of the family all lived in the house on Brunswick Street.)
The shortest day of the year and the garden’s winter light seems crisper, a dryness to the cool air. As I get older, I realise more and more my gardening is taking on aspects of the Nonnos and Nonnas among us, as if by osmosis… checking each day, touching the plant leaves, saving seeds, happiness at seeing healthy worms in the freshly turned over soil. Perhaps one day I’ll even start planting by the moon like many Italian gardeners do, instead of plonking plants in and hoping for the best.
It’s usually feast or famine in my garden and while I’ve always wanted to be one of those people who have lots of magnificent flowers growing, it seems they never bloom much and then move on to the next life. 
Coming back from the shop recently, I passed a house that had a bucket of free geranium cuttings out front and stopped to take a couple.
I was so focused on the bee burrowing into the rose on the right, I didn’t realise I’d captured the bee in flight to the left. Such a lovely surprise! Hope your week brings you some little bit of unexpected luck and gladness no matter how small it might be. 
My vegie patch has been going well this spring – I’ve counted 36 tomatoes on the plants so far – and also coming along well is the corn (my first try growing it) and there’s eggplant, pumpkin, figs, plenty of pawpaws, lots of different herbs, nasturtiums, daisies and sunflowers on their way for the bees.
Really hoping the severity of the storms forecast doesn’t eventuate so that not just the garden but people and animals stay safe too. I’ve used this fine, white netting that is best for protection from hail as well as hungry visitors. (The other netting pictured that is black with larger holes is not very effective and it’s cruel as birds and flying foxes can’t see it as well and also get caught up in it and break their wings.)
About twenty years ago, my mother gave me a little sapling that had sprung up beneath a big, spreading tree in her backyard. She’s been gone for a long while now but that sapling is now a big, spreading tree in my backyard and to sit under it and look up to the sunlight trickling through the leaves is just magic.
Amazing how a much longed-for pour of rain a few days ago has brought about a basil forest in the vegie patch! So, it’s all things basil for a bit with this beautiful harvest… homemade pizza with basil, tomato and mozzarella, basil pesto with orecchiette and crispy prosciutto, as well as bruschetta with basil, tomato and balsamic. (Any other ideas for basil are most welcome. As is a little more rain all round for everyone in Australia!) And I have to say that Costa 
Our two birdbaths and various ground dishes about the place are being visited and almost emptied every day by both day and night visitors to the garden. 😊🐦🐝🐞🐾
Doing things like an Italian you’d never have thought you would when growing up… 
Granny Maddalena harvesting from her vegie garden before going inside to cook for all the family. Sometimes it’s the simplest things…
Some lovely, spring, vegie patch colours… 
First flowering after five years in wait… orchids from a cutting my godmother, ‘Aunty Fred’ gave me from her garden, from a cutting that was from her mother’s garden.
…keeping up with the eggplants (see 
Unexpectedly found these beauties growing behind another plant in a pot on the balcony. Completely self-sown! There must be at least thirty cherry tomatoes on the plant. A lovely, surprise present from nature. Can’t wait for them to ripen!
Came across this lovely linen, hand towel, circa 1940s/1950s, hand-embroidered to be a keepsake from Norfolk Island. (The picture frame is circa 1920s that I already had and happened to be a lucky fit!)
Another piece from my Italian great-grandmother, Bisnonna Francesca’s glory box… (Cesca in my books). This hand-embroidered pillow sham from 1920s Calabria travelled in the hull of a ship across the world to a new life in Australia and remained tucked away for many decades… a keepsake of another place and life that might have been.
The first carnations are in bloom in the backyard and have a lovely scent…
Usually we end up eating most of these picked straight from the tree in the backyard but perhaps this year some might last long enough to cook with…
Another piece from the chest of drawers containing linens sewn by my grandmothers… since it was last a picture of my Italian great-grandmother’s initialled linen pillow cover (or pillow sham) from 1920s Calabria, it seemed fitting this time to take out this doily with embroidery hand-stitched by my Australian grandmother, circa 1950s in Brisbane – mezza italiana/mezza australiana….
Chatting over the fence my Sicilian neighbour, who is in her eighties, recommended to put a lemon leaf under polpette (those Italian slightly egg-shaped meatballs) when frying them in olive oil in the pan – not necessarily to eat the leaf but for it to impart flavour during cooking. I haven’t tried that yet however seeing these fresh young leaves I might need to give it a go.
Time for an Italian classic…a take on Pizza Margherita.
From the Isabella vine that grows over the pergola, some of the grapes harvested this year (in one of Nanna Francesca’s salad bowls circa 1960s/70s.) Each year the grapevine yields enough to make about half a dozen bottles of wine…a modest, homemade vintage but a tiny bit of Italy in an Australian suburban backyard.
Each day the peas in the vegie patch are getting plumper and I can’t wait until they are ready to be picked, not that any will make it to the pot. Since childhood, I’ve loved fresh peas straight from the garden. And peas seemed to have worked their way into both my books: Nanna Francesca, her mother and grandmother in Calabria, sitting on their balcony overlooking the sea, shelling peas and feeling the breeze as lightning licked the horizon… And the pea patch Nonno Anni grew in his New Farm backyard in my childhood… Even now, though both my grandparents are gone, when I look at my own, much smaller, pea patch, I’m reminded of happy memories being a child among their pea plants that were taller than I was – my own little forest. Winter sun warm on my shoulders as I would make my way along the rows, eating the peas, my grandparents not far away…
Spring in Australia starts today {although the equinox is a few weeks off yet}. I wish I’d grown these myself but I took this picture during the northern hemisphere’s spring – in Beutelsbach, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, where I was doing research for a future book. It seemed every window box and garden were growing beautiful red flowers.
I know it’s a modest harvest yet I was thrilled to pick the first greens grown in our kitchen garden and make a salad for lunch with red and purple lettuce, parsley, basil and stevia leaves. I also added some cherry tomatoes (from the farmer’s market not the vegie patch, though I noticed the tomatoes I planted have some baby ones starting to form!)
… and also ladybirds, lacewings and other garden friends.
il bouquet perfetto for Valentine’s Day
It’s coffee harvest time again… these we picked from our backyard tree. Then, by hand, R extracted the beans from inside the coffee cherries and the beans are now spread out on wide sieves drying.
Zoë Boccabella 