My Garden

Everyone needs a place for the soul to feel at peace, a place where your mind seeks inspiration and rest after times of struggle. For me it is my garden. I suppose it all goes back to my childhood, to the garden my great aunt once had. There was a small summer cabin surrounded by the orchard, and multiple flower beds. Her husband designed the layout: narrow paths bordered by irises, hedges of fragrant black currant bushes fencing off the property, and rows of fruit trees heavy with their sweet harvest in the fall. After his death my aunt (I always called her simply “aunt”, dropping “great”) refused to sell the place. I believe she and the garden needed each other.
She started taking me along since I was five or six years old, and taught me many wonderful things. I learned that tulips and daffodils had to be lifted from the soil after their leaves turn yellow in July, and planted again with good nurturing compost in the fall assuring their continuous bloom. I learned that rose bushes had to be pruned and covered with straw and soil to protect them from winter cold. I learned how to graft a fruit tree and feel ridiculously happy at the first signs of new leaves on a freshly-attached twig. I became a gardener.
Years later and miles away I finally have my own little garden, a distant relative of my childhood place of long ago. It speaks to me in the same secret language. My aunt would have approved…