They looked like green sticks for sale at the Te Atatu Garden Club and Floral Circle but the ladies said these sticks would grow into tree dahlias, higher than the doorway, over 20 feet, towering above the house. They have to be seen to be believed. So I bought three and planted them down the back fence, next to our neighbour's cabbage tree, because I figured it would like another tree companion.
The cabbage tree isn't really a tree it's just a giant lily apparently. The tree dahlia is a giant dahlia and so now I will have some height to my garden. I just won't tell mum I have planted a tree because if she knew how tall they get she would have it immediately removed, but since its flowers and they will need to be cut down anyway this could be the exception.
My other spot of gardening was edging my camellia woodland bed with liriope or turf lily. I had a big clump of it to divide so put in a curved edge and hopefully it will grow in 5 cms of soil. Well maybe not but it was growing on top of the stones quite happily not dying for a few months so I think it will survive where I've put them. It's just I haven't quite been able to make enough of my own soil yet to cover all this clay, and I don't have a dump truck that can truck it from somewhere else. But at least it's not growing on weedmat.
Am going to the movies tomorrow and seeing another gardening based movie. The other week it was 'This Beautiful Fantastic' which was highly unrealistic movie about a librarian who writes stories and attempts to make a garden. I say unrealistic because its very stererotypical about librarians, writers and gardeners. Of course, what would I know having been all three, but the thing is she hooks up with a cute guy who is an identical triplet inventor she meets at the library, and they start talking, and then he gets chucked out and she gets fired for talking in the library??!
I was very annoyed at this movie because this is not how libraries are in the real world. I got told I was too quiet, and never once did I meet cute identical triplet inventor - all I met were drug addicts and homeless people and nobody ever spoke to me except to ask where the toilets were. And the garden part was a let down because she only dug out a pond yet didn't plant any plants, didn't make any compost, and didn't even have her mother on her back because she was an orphan and raised by nuns. I just think it's easier for fictional characters to be orphans because being a mother is too hard to portray in a movie and no actress really wants to be a mother. It's more drama and fun to be young, attractive and beautifully eccentric than to act out being a mother and your lines full of nags like.... 'How many times have I told you??' and another thing is, being told off by your mother does not really attract movie-goers. She just had a grumpy neighbour instead. He was into gardening, but in my experience its the people who aren't gardeners that are the grumpy ones.
So I hope 'The Artist Garden' is more realistic. I actually have been painted in a garden and you can see this painting at the Korero Cafe I am in it. One day at the Ranui Community Garden an artist asked us horticulture students if she could paint us in the garden so she set up her easel and we just went about our business and next thing I know we are immortalised on impressionist canvas amongst the tomatoes, silverbeet and fennel.
