Yesterday's Garden Short showed the sprawling problem of my Giant Pineapple Lily.
Leaves and flower-stalks that should be proudly upright—and to almost six feet!—are flopped and sprawled and splayed and blown-out as bad as flat tires.

ARGH! (And who can imagine the embarrassment of the lily itself?)

Then preparations for the inevitable dinner party inadvertently brought the tools of the solution.

1. A huge ginger-jar vase that needed filling.

2. The wheelbarrow to haul away clippings that had accumulated all over the terrace in the frantic week before.
Plus, on the sideboard, the watering can (ever-present to water all the Summer containers) and the clippers (ever-present also: there's never an end to the nipping and tucking of a garden.)

In two minutes it was done: First a couple of flower stalks were harvested and slid down into the vase.

Their prostration had put some serious kink into their stems—but this looked cool when they were reverticalized. Debility was transformed into display!

Relieved of the rest of its flowerstalks, the huge and heavy potted tangle of floppy leaves was ready to be hoisted into the wheelbarrow.


My back is still aching: the pot was maximally hydrated thanks to twice-a-day watering.

So it weighed a ton.

And there were plenty of roots out the bottom, sinking deep into six inches of mulch at the bottom of the pot.

I'd forgotten: I'd even given the plant access to this extra reservoir of moisture. Given the floppy leaves, though, it still wasn't enough. Sigh.

Trundling the behemoth around to the back-stage side of the carriage house, I grunted it back down to the gravel.
It can spend the rest of the season in peace, well watered and fertilized still, but now without anyone grimacing at the sorry to-the-ground splay of its foliage.

Back to the vase. Now holding all the stalks, it was quite the eye-catcher.
True, just as much a "Jeez, what IS that?" as "Oh my what gorgeous flowers." But it's better to be noticed for anything at all than not noticed at all—clearly, a slogan I'm living, like it or not—so of course I'm delighted with the results.

And now I have an empty spot—oh joy!. Into the terra cotta cachepot goes a standard of yellow daisy bush, Euryops pectinatus 'Viridis'...

...with three spare pots of the sensational Shield-Leaf begonia, Begonia convolvulacea, just stacked around the trunk of the Euryops. Their cascading life and heavy overlapping foliage hides their nursery pots.

That's my biggest and best variegated Elephant Food at the foot. The Portulacaria afra 'Variegata' was there all along, but the floppy eucomis leaves had just about hidden it.

A happy ending all around, then, even the next morning with the eucomis stalks in an "I'm big too, but SO differently then you, bud" stand-off with the giant purple banana.


And now to clean out all those damned votive holders.