Fantastic foliage

It’s good to have a play – and doesn’t happen often enough for lots of us as adults. Last weekend I caught up with Nicky. We met in the city and had no big plans, just walking down North Terrace, and decided to go into the Library – they often have interesting exhibitions in their upstairs area. Turns out they did – a cracker about gardening in Adelaide over the years, with lots of good info and photos and memorabilia. There was a picture taken in the 1920s in Hartley Road Flinders Park in flood. This is just round the corner from my sister’s place now, just an ordinary suburb, but then all the market gardens there swamped! Who knew?? Another fun fact – 90% of all Australia’s almonds at one time came from… Marion. Yes, Marion, the suburb and home of the big shopping centre used to have shitloads of almond trees.

Well all this was very interesting, but the best bit was contributing to the Fantastic Foliage wall – the far end of the exhibition area had been made into a kind of vertical garden with attendees to the exhibition invited to create a piece of foliage from paper and scissors and masking tape, and stick it to the wall. It looked great and was too good an opportunity to miss. While we were there at least half a dozen other folk rocked up and contributed their bits to the wall, including Stacey and Paul, whose pics we took and who took ours. All of us were adults, though quite obviously lots of kids have made foliage too. It was excellent fun!

Here are a few closer up shots… you can see messages from people from Sri Lanka and Brazil and New Zealand; “Christos thinks Simon is an absolute rippa”; “world domination begins” (world domination by gardening, or by playing around with paper and scissors wouldn’t be so bad perhaps!); there are more messages from Edith and Ottavia and Amira and Melbourne… and heaps of anonymous messages too of course, like ours, saying without words ‘have a go’, ‘play around’, ‘think of what we can grow together’ ‘thank heaven for libraries’ ‘have a laugh’ and sundry other stuff.