On a Sunday morning drive, I picked up a living fossil. Sold from a tiny untended stall by the road, along with pumpkins and overripe apples, a young gingko tree. Barely half a meter tall sapling, with the number of leaves I could count on my fingers. A hand-drawn tag said EUR1.50. I thought it…
There is undeniable magic about the first snow, especially in mid-February and in a climate where it is almost bound to be the last. Where I live now, it is so rare when the snow does not melt immediately. A week of freezing temperatures ensured that the magic stayed for days. The garden looked stunningly…
A woman stood in front of my window. She seemed to be peering into the living room. Ours is a busy urban street, a tram stop across the road, a petrol station, cars speeding by, people rushing past on their way to the beach. No one lingers. I would like them to, at some point,…
It has been a strange spring – sunny, very dry and remarkably chilly. We had our first frosts of the year in mid-April. I sowed compulsively at the end of March and first half of April, the worst and scariest of the quarantine. Very little of that came up. I had to go over the…
“Now that we spend so much time at home…” – was the only acknowledgement of the current situation in the second episode of 2020 Gardeners’ World last week. Indeed, what more can we possibly say? Who could have thought this was possible? Who could have thought there could be so much time for stay-home gardening…
It is 8.30am, the official sunrise at 78˚ degrees northern latitude. But it has been light for nearly two hours. This far into the Arctic circle, in late February, the sun lingers just beneath the horizon, its rays reflected by snow-capped ridges and low clouds. A long, unhurried dawn. The polar night finished just over…
The dreamy time, on the way from darkness to light. With most of the night behind us, it is not morning quite yet. It is early enough to roll over and sleep on and yet it is late enough to get up and face the day. I am undecided. A part of me refuses to…
We are in mid-winter, the season of death and dying behind us. This year, I did not take notice of the nature’s dying, focused as I was on the nature of human death. Shattered, fragmented, turned upside down, inside out and ultimately inwards by my mother’s passing away in September. Now it is just stillness.…
The greatest vegetable of all times (don’t tell the tomatoes) Nothing says Eastern Europe to me as this one single vegetable. The Dutch learn to cycle before they walk, we eat borscht before we develop teeth. Scrumptious, delicious, versatile, beetroot is completely underestimated and underused here in the West. People seem actually scared of it,…
2019 will be known as a year of tomatoes in our household. Tomatoes galore, tomato extravaganza. A trial by tomatoes. It started innocently enough, way back in February, and according to the book: we equipped ourselves with the Ikea’s Vaxer growing kit – complete with germination trays and a special potting mix – and bought…
My roots and bulbs 