Photo: John Borren. Sustainable Backyards is back for 2020, bringing with it a month-long calendar of environmental events in March. This year celebrates 15 years of sustainability, focused on individual efforts and there are more than 230 events...

Making art and floral arrangements  using driftwood from the beach was something my grandmother Esther Harvey loved doing. She’d find a curved, unusual piece of driftwood, take it home, and it would appear the next Sunday at the front of...

It’s a festival of love, of light, of colour and of happiness. This ancient cultural festival hails from India but is travelling across the world, spreading colour and happiness wherever  it goes. The Holi Colour Splash festival is now...

My sewing machine has died and I need to cart it off to get fixed, mainly because it satisfies the need to make things out of the quirky, colourful fabrics I seem to hoard. Being creative can be exhausting so I tend to pack resources away in boxes...

Recently I took a Saturday sunset drive up to Manaia in the Coromandel. I actually had no exact idea where I was going, but had been invited to a birthday celebration, left work at 5pm and set off. It had been one of those extremely hot January days,...

Good Neighbour’s community gardens at Bethlehem and Welcome Bay are the result of awesome foresight and a lot of planning by some incredibly insightful individuals. In partnership with two generous landowners, the gardens were built with the...

Daniel Hines was only three when he ran away from home with his two-year-old sister in tow. He was heading to the local dairy – the Welcome Bay Foodmarket. “I jumped the gates at home. We were determined to go to my nana’s house, but...

Kids have a unique way of looking at things, and maybe it’s time we consider what they want from our city. Baycourt will bring that possibility to life with the upcoming Lookout performance, running on February 14-16. The performance takes audience...

The trio of octogenarians  were chuckling as they came towards  me down the Oakland driveway in 13th Ave. Rex OConnor, age 86, Jennifer Mundy, 81, and Shirley Boivin, 82, were going tandem skydiving. I wondered who the ringleader was. “When...

Roger Mabbett was driving along Portside Drive a few months before Christmas when he noticed a small sign on the side of the road. Puzzled he went to check it out. “It had ‘museum’ on it, and I thought ‘we don’t have a...