The Pomonal Progress Association is running a massive raffle to raise funds for the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute, a passion of Professor Kannourakis, who visits Stawell and Horsham on a regular basis to save cancer patients from making long trips to Ballarat for appointments and treatment.

To say thanks for all his hard work the Pomonal group is raffling a crocheted, queen sized, pure wool ‘Baroque bedspread’.

Tickets for the raffle are $2 each and can be bought at the Pomonal Native Flower Show, to be held at the Pomonal Hall on October 7 and 8. Opening times are 9.30am to 5pm on the Saturday and 10am to 4pm on the Sunday. Entry is $5 adults and children free.

The popular Pomonal Native Flower Show will be held again this spring and it will be the 35th consecutive show. It will be the second show to be held in the new Pomonal Hall and this year the hall gardens will be landscaped with native plants.

Presented by the Australian Plants Society Grampians Group, the show is created over two days by an enthusiastic band of members with flowers picked from private gardens in Pomonal, Ararat, Stawell and Dunkeld.

More than 300 native flowers will be on display and they will all be named so picking favourites and writing wish lists will be easy to do. The featured plant family this year will be the Rutaceae family so lots of popular genera like Correas, Boronias, Philothecas, native citrus and Diplolaenas will take centre stage.

There will also be thousands of native plants for sale, botany, gardening and natural history books to buy and refreshments available.

Several local native gardens will be open and entry will be free to these with a show entry ticket. Maps will be available at the hall.

The Pomonal Village Market will be held on the Pomonal Oval over the same weekend.

For more information, contact Linda Handscombe on 0407 700843 or email dlhandscombe@bigpond.com