Gardening makes me happy. It gives so much energy. Even when it's hard work sometimes. No life without green around me. I grow up with plants. I learned it since I was very young from my father. I learned the latin names as if they were normal names. I didn't know better. I've been busy whenever possible with seeding, growing and maintaining. I had always a garden, small or big. The last one in the Netherlands was a very nice garden. It took more then 10 years to create it. It's nice to take care of something. When you put in time and energy to make things grow, or grow better and it works. When plants grow from very small seeds to big flowering plants, like a natural wonder. For me it's fun. My life.
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| My former garden in The Netherlands |
In Sweden I got the chance to have a big garden, with a lot of space to create my own new garden with creative objects within the traditional culture. Maybe even trying to keep something of former days, like grandma's plants. This blog is about this process creating a new nostalgic garden in Småland. How to learn and deal with circumstances. It is like in real live. Not with a lot of money, just go with the flow, but living in balance with nature.
In the 50's the old school closed and the building was sold to a lady who lived there for a long time, nearly 60 years. We have been told she liked gardening. She was always outside in the garden and the garden was full of flowers. We want to make it that way again. Today we still can find old traces of gardening. We found already the old times compost place, black currant plants (svart vinbärbusker) and some of the (mormorsväxter) grandmothers plants. The lady, Elsa Lindfors, was also creating concrete sculptures. Today we still find three fisher man at the lake, an old man watching the gate, a hare, some flowers and some frogs in the garden.
But it was a long way, to create a garden to visit but we liked it. We had to start form scratch. The garden was totally overgrown after nearly 10 years being a summerhouse. Without any attention for the garden. The Christmas trees grow out of form and balance. The gravel path just disappeared. It was covered under weeds, which you could cut with a grass cutter. The big green Maple (lönn) trees and wild raspberries were growing everywhere from seeds, not only through the Rhododendron, actually through the whole garden. The Ground Elder (Kirskål/Zevenblad) en grasses were everywhere. It took about 4 years of weeding and cutting to see a sort of garden again. After that we could finally start creating and planting, while maintaining. After finishing this big project, we opened for visitors with a small trädgardscafe: Sjöbygget Trädgård.
