My first garden memories instantly evoke feelings of cold, of blustering wind, of being excluded and of having my nose pressed up against the glass, looking down.
Meppelweg 33, den Haag in the Netherlands is where I was born (literally, born at home) and where this memory takes place. I'm the 3rd child of 4, born into a dense post-war housing crisis: my mother a Dutch-German-Jewish refugee and my father a white Dutch-Indonesian refugee repatriated from the Japanese concentration camps of colonial Indonesia. Housing was at a premium. At that time, 6 of us lived in a one room apartment on the top floor. No lift.
The second image is the actual street I was born in, at about the time I have this memory.
Volkstuin. It means "community garden".
In post war Holland with still severe food shortages, gardening was not a hobby, but a serious business to optimize every inch of ground during the incredibly short growing season. Each family had a tiny plot, and the focus was on edible results. In my mind's eye, our family plot was not unlike one of these:
What impact did this garden memory have?
- I'm allergic to vegetables planted in rows, and now totally LOVE messy, organic and "volunteer" gardens;
- I honestly could never live in a place without a garden, and feel so utterly claustrophobic at just the photo of that confined way of living;
- I have felt, first hand, the freedom a garden can give. And that garden freedom means nothing if you've never been allocated a tiny, unproductive, windswept allotment.
Gardening lessons?
- Always opt for climbing beans to save space & protect seedlings from the wind;
- Grow things that can be preserved;
- Children love and need and enjoy the garden - excluding them stays with them for a lifetime;
- Timing and awareness of weather and frosts is everything;
- Tomatoes never disappoint;
- Always consider what's growing right next door to your plot.
Interestingly, my SECOND garden memory is FFWD some years later to Australia, and my father allocated all 4 of us kids a patch of garden - about 3 meters by maybe 1.5 meters. From all of that huge 1/4 acre block, he still only cut off a postage stamp sized piece for us. He tried to tell us what to plant, and I was disobedient. I didn't want vegetables or productivity. I distinctly remember planting a small nectarine tree that a kind aunt (one of our sponsors) gave me in a jam tin. And I planted chrysanthemums. I remember my father trying to coax me to plant beans like my brother, and I wouldn't cave. The nectarine fruited abundantly for a decade and was my joy. And came home one day in my late teens to my father having cut it down, without warning or valid reason. "It was making too much shade for the beans."
Writing this today, I marvel at how much I love wild gardens and food forests, and how some part of that is sheer rebellion to how I was raised, and the other part is exactly what I was raised to think and do. Breathing into that cold-nosed-pressed-against-the-glass feeling, and planning a long, barefooted walk round the wild Thai garden tomorrow... just because I can.
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