Gardening

Gardening for me is partly a dream and partly reality. I'm living in the countryside, where I do have a small rock garden near our house, but it's not my house and this is the third garden I'm starting on someone else's land. So, I'm dreaming of having my own garden, having total control over its layout. Yet there is one particular garden I'm familiar with - my parent's garden.

When I was five year old, my parents bought a small lot on a hillside near the city of Litomerice, which annually hosts the "Garden of Bohemia" trade fair. The area is indeed the center of Czech farming and gardening. The flat lands around Labe river, with their rich soil have been traditionally the source of grains, friuts and vegetables. But the region is also warm enough to grow grapes for local wines and hops, the green gold of the Czech Republic, for famous Czech beers.

The lot my parents bought was an old vinyard, the first south facing hill overlooking the flat farm land, busy railroad track, the river and a few hills in the distance. One of them is Rip, the legendary mountain on which the Forefather Czech stood when he (supposedly) said: "I see the land full of milk and honey..." and thus decided to hang around here with his tribe. Well, what he saw was very different from what we see today, back then, there was no farmland, just woods.

But our old vinyard was in a condition similar to the 9th century and likely resembling what Forefather Czech saw when he looked at our hill back then - bushes. Actually, not just any bushes, a few very old fruitless apricot and pear trees, blackthorn, some mulberry and a lot of rosehip. For those of you unfamiliar with Central European flora - rosehip has a lot of thorns and when you chop it down, it happily sproutes back. To keep things simple, the lot had no electricity and ... no water. Our "garden plan" started with machetes and took 25 years to execute.

What I remember from my early gardening days is playing with the clay, sculpting bowls and other fancy objects, letting them dry in the scorching sun, coloring them with watercolors. It turned out that the entire hill is all clay (not a piece of fluffy airy soil needed for gardening) and plaener stone, used as the only source of local stone for construction. Plaener weathers to crumbles within a few years and we found such crumbled remnants of old vinyard walls on and near the property. Some stones had prehistoric fossil shells in them.

What was great fun for a five year old, was definitely no fun for my parents - and it stopped being cool for me as soon as I've grown to the age when I "could help". I made the nearby bushes, fields, orchards and woods my playground and tried to stay away from our garden. From "gardening" I mostly remember hauling carts full of water canisters from the nearest village, hauling bushloads of weeds to the compost or burning pile or harvesting onions, brading them together to let them dry under the eaves of our small tar-paper covered "cottage".

By the time my parents build the nice A-frame cottage, got water from the river for the garden and drinking water from the village, hooked up to electricity, they have already spent fifteen years making a garden from a rock hard clay hill. To my complete amazement, they did it. The clay is so rich in nutrients, than when kept somewhat aerated and watered, plants grow like crazy. So I also remember all the fruits, vegetables and wide array of flowers, lush and green.

All it took was hard work, quarter of a century of hard work. There never was a garden plan. The only plan was to keep the hill without weeds and grow whatever wants to grow. By the time I grew up, all I knew about gardening was hauling weeds and I pretty much hated it. But I did love flowers. I also love homemade pickles and Mommy's apricot jam. Despite all the hard work, I was hooked on gardening. I've lived in the city and started to miss nature, miss our garden. I had to move to the country.

Then I married Jim, a former landscape architect, and it became apparent the he had a plan for my parent's lot. Over the past few years, we started building wooden retaining walls and our garden, afrer all, has some order to it. My Mom and I finally have the time to visit the Garden of Bohemia trade fairs and pick up the latest varieties of dahlias or irises. The need for growing and canning our own food vanished with the fall of the Iron Curtain, so our garden can showcase less vegetables and more lawn and flower beds. I love it and, more importantly, my parents, now retired, love it. For them the dream came true.

I'm still waiting for my own garden. I study gardening magazines and seed catalogs, selecting plants, which could make it up here in the mountains. I try some plants in my rock garden, observe the gardens in my neighborhood and have long gardening chats with my sister, who has a summerhouse in our village. I envision a Mediterranean style garden, but that's just not possible up here, with 2 meters of snow and 6 months of winter. I secretly envy my mom that horribly hot clay hill, because over there - plants grow like crazy!