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Creative Botanic Diary of a Green Th-mum-b Photographer Growing a Small Kitchen & Cut Flower Garden in West Melb 🇦🇺 Highlights in Stories👇🏼

POSTS STORIES REELS

Elvina Farkas · Australia @anemony_botanicjournal

“At the moment, I’m fascinated by the idea of plants we dismiss as weeds.”

Photographer and botanical observer Elvina Farkas @anemony_botanicjournal is looking more closely at overlooked plants, native flora and the full life cycle of flowers.

Read the full story in the FLOWER CLUB INTERNATIONAL Journal at flowerclubint.com 🤍

Photographs: Elvina Farkas by @anemony_botanicjournal

The Best Things to Do in the Garden: Early–Mid Spring

— Feed the garden as growth takes off
As plants wake up and put on fresh growth, replenish nutrients with compost, aged manure or an appropriate organic fertiliser. Spring is hungry work.

— Start your warm-season seeds
Tomatoes, capsicum, eggplant, cucumber, zucchini, pumpkin, corn and beans can start making their way onto the sowing list. In cooler areas, start frost-sensitive varieties somewhere protected and wait for consistently warmer conditions before planting them out.

— Keep succession sowing
Don’t sow everything at once. Stagger fast-growing vegetables and flowers every few weeks to help extend your harvests and flowering season rather than having everything arrive at once.

— Get ahead of the weeds
Unfortunately, your plants aren’t the only things enjoying spring. Pull weeds while they’re still small and before they flower or set seed. Future you will be extremely grateful.

— Watch for pests (and the good guys)
Fresh spring growth brings aphids, snails, slugs and other hungry visitors — but also plenty of beneficial insects. Check plants regularly before reaching for treatments and learn who’s actually visiting your garden.

— Support plants before they need it
Install stakes, trellises, arches and netting while plants are still manageable. Peas, beans, tomatoes, dahlias and taller cut flowers are much easier to support before they become an unruly mess.

— Deadhead, harvest and keep picking
Regularly harvesting flowers, herbs and productive crops — and deadheading spent blooms — can encourage many plants to keep producing. Also, is there anything more satisfying than finally bringing things back inside from the garden?

— Try not to plant everything you see
Spring arrives and suddenly every nursery visit feels like a completely reasonable excuse to buy another plant.

It isn’t.

You (and I) will do it anyway… 😂

Final tip: Spring looks very different depending on where you garden, so always consider your local climate, frost dates and current conditions before planting warm-season crops outside. ✌🏼

#homegardener #gardeningaustralia #springgarden by @anemony_botanicjournal

The kitchen garden is really starting to take shape now, with so much growth happening across each bed and all of the potted fruit trees.

I’m hoping to do a little kitchen garden tour soon and share everything that’s growing — along with all the things I’ve somehow still yet to sow. My gosh, I feel so behind this season! It’s been so busy over here that there never seems to be quite enough time.

Despite that, we’ve had a decent little harvest already. The snow peas and broad beans have finished up, and there’s plenty of silverbeet, basil and parsley coming through on the weekly - plus I’ve got some zucchini almost ready to pick. Yay!

Since adding two more garden beds and one very oversized pot, I’ve pretty much doubled my growing space compared with this time last year. That’s also meant being able to experiment with quite a few new things for the first time — sweet corn, fennel, tromboncino and a few other bits and pieces I can’t recall right at this moment.

Would love to know what new additions have made it into your kitchen garden this year 👇🏼

Big love always,
E x by @anemony_botanicjournal

HOW TO FALL IN LOVE, AGAIN AND AGAIN.

My Sophie Rochas rose — first bloom, and I am SHOOK.

Absolutely stunning.

Love always,
E x by @anemony_botanicjournal

Today’s Flower Play session, inspired by 💀🖤🥀 Halloween.

Also, my daughter’s half-eaten apple made the perfect little witchy moment. Would I have preferred a pumpkin? Absolutely. But as you guys already know, I work only with what the garden (and rug rats) give me. 🤭

Most of this arrangement is made from dried and finished ex-FLOWERTHON goodies, with the addition of some spiky scabiosa heads. Once their petals drop, they leave behind these wonderfully weird little spiked balls that feel very appropriate for the occasion. 🔪

Anyway… BRB. Gotta go get my tarot cards out for a reading. 🖤

E x by @anemony_botanicjournal

Mother’s Choice Peony (Herbaceous) 🤍

One of the best new additions to my garden this year, producing large, ruffled, soft blush-pink flowers with the most delicate rosy scent from early to mid spring.

She gave me nine blooms in total, which was such a pleasant surprise and a lovely little introduction to just how floriferous this variety can be.

She held beautifully in the vase, but out in the garden she was definitely less impressed by the rain. Heavy downpours marked the petals and muddied her colouring quickly, which is a lesson learnt for next year.

My final blooms have now finished for the season, and as for whether she’s earned her place for another year… absolutely. She’s very much a keeper and very much *this* mother’s choice. 🤍

Other peonies recently added to the collection, but yet to debut:
Love Affair — Itoh
Madame J.V. Odier — Herbaceous
Mons. Jules Elie — Herbaceous
Emma Klehm — Herbaceous

With such limited space in my small garden, only the best of the best will make it to a long term garden position, but alas will need to wait another year for comparisons. (Patience, is perhaps, not one of my stronger qualities).

Much love always,
E x by @anemony_botanicjournal

BEFORE & AFTER:
A quick ‘cutting garden’ zone comparison, mid-October 2026. 🌸

Because so many of my long-term structural plants — magnolias, viburnum, buxus and a handful of key perennials — are still very much in their juvenile stage, it’s been much easier to fill in the gaps with quick-growing spring and summer annuals.

I only started planting this area back in June this year, so we haven’t even hit the six-month mark officially yet.

Even in this relatively short time, I’ve learnt so much about what’s working, what isn’t, and what I’d like to change for future seasons.

I guess that’s one of the joys of gardening: very little is ever truly permanent. And the things that I plan to keep are the ones that have earnt a special place in my heart — and therefore in my precious, and extremely limited, garden real estate. 🤍

There’s still so much to learn, of course, but with every season that passes, I know my knowledge, confidence and most importantly, the soil, will all keep improving.

I’m really looking forward to comparing the growth again in another three months.

Keeping you posted always,
E x by @anemony_botanicjournal

We’re so thrilled to share that our photographic series ‘Flower Boy’ has been shortlisted for RUSSH Creative Showcase 2026!

After spending much of our creative careers working internationally, I can’t express how meaningful it is to have our work recognised here in Australia, especially as we begin this next chapter under our FARKAS+MILONE moniker.

A huge thank you to @russhmagazine for including us alongside so many other talented creatives 🙏🏼✨

If our series resonated with you, we’d absolutely love your vote! It would mean a great deal to us, and to Enzo too, of course!!

🌸 You can vote for ‘Flower Boy by Farkas+Milone’ at the link I’ll place in our bio.

Voting closes at midnight on 8 Nov. by @anemony_botanicjournal

It’s been three years now since Luc and I uprooted our lives, business and family from Singapore to return to Australian shores, and if I’m allowed to be open and honest here for a sec… it’s been an uphill battle.

For much of these past few years, our home and family life have sat firmly at the centre of almost every decision we’ve made. And somewhere amongst it all, our creative work — both personally and professionally — took a back seat for far longer than either of us expected.

Life had already handed us a lot in the years leading up to our move, and then in the midst of rebuilding a new one in a country we hadn’t called home for a very long, came the beautiful chaos of a newborn, the renovation of our first property, a formal diagnosis for our eldest, and navigating devastating grief, after losing my sister Lisa, who was taken from this earth far too early for me to ever comprehend.

For a while, I think I lost a little bit of myself in amongst it all.

And then, as some of you already know, what started as another home project of fixing up the back garden, somehow became the new creative outlet I didn’t know I needed.

Somewhere between sowing seeds, growing flowers, and simply learning to notice things again, I also started finding my way back to photography — something so integral to my entire identity, and I hadn’t even noticed that I’d lost it.

This was the point in life, where you look at everything you’ve lived through, everything you’ve lost, everything you’ve built, and realise the woman emerging on the other side of it all, is never going to be the same person who had jumped in.

So it’s taken me time, 3 years worth of time, but I finally feel like there’s space opening up again — for photography, for flowers, for creative work, for new collaborations, for Luc and I to make things together, and for me to explore all these strange little threads that have somehow started weaving themselves into my next chapter.

Honestly, I love the thought of reinvention, at whatever age and in whatever form it finds you. La vita è bella.

Love always,
E x

P.S, Singapore, stay safe from the Haze my loves xx by @anemony_botanicjournal

Whewww… what an absolutely insane couple of weeks it’s been. 😂

Between photographing a fellow gardening friend (my own post on that coming soon!), having one of my close friends from Singapore come to visit, catching up with a few local garden friends, rushing to prep the kitchen garden beds for the season ahead, editing photo work, and then diving headfirst into the wonderfully chaotic intensity of FLOWERTHON… all while squeezing in normal life and a bout of sickness between the kids and myself…

I genuinely feel like I haven’t stopped for about 14 days.

But here we are — a rainy weekend, a slightly slower pace, and finally a chance to catch up on some of those lingering to-do lists. Sometimes nature really does seem to hand you a little pause right when you need it.

So here’s a quiet one for today: the last beautiful stems of my Merlot hellebores, gathered into a little leftover arrangement for the kitchen with dried gumnuts, bottlebrush stems and unopened flower pods, peony foliage and native grass.

And can we please appreciate how beautifully those tones sit against the brass kitchen tap?! 🤎✨

Back to editing now — I’ve got lots of new posts and content to catch up on, plus some lovely new freelance projects coming up that I’m really excited about.

Big, HUGE love always to all my wonderful flower and garden friends on this insane journey with me. 🤍

So grateful to have you all!
E xx by @anemony_botanicjournal