Thursday afternoon: I’m sitting in the temperate pyramid greenhouse at the Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton’s botanical garden. It’s slightly cold, but with my Peruvian alpaca sweater I won’t freeze. The smell in here is heavenly, a combination of pine and herbs and the early blooming daffodils.
It’s not big, the conservatory, with four greenhouse pyramids: the arid, the tropical, the temperate and the feature (today holding an exhibit of the teddy bears having a picnic), but its pretty. The smells and the sound of running water in both the temperate and tropical pyramids have such a soothing influence on me, I could sit here for hours. After having taken the whole tour through all the pyramids, I sat down next to a blooming banana plant in the tropical pyramid and caught up with some writing. When my hands started to tremble from low blood sugar, I went out to eat the small lunch of boiled eggs, an apple and a carrot that I had taken with me, and then ended up here again, in the temperate pyramid.
An elk’s-horn fern growing on an Alexandra palm in the tropical pyramid. An excellent specimen of an epiphyte.
I think I could enjoy having a garden. My Finnish grandmother was an amazing gardener, and the memories I have of all the flowers in her garden when I came there every summer as a child border on fantastical. The lilies and roses and poppies that simply flowed over in her flower beds. But it’s a lot of work, keeping a garden, and to be honest, what I enjoy the most is just sitting like this, breathing, taking in all the calming shades of green.
It was in my grandmother’s garden that I started writing my only finished novel manuscript at nineteen, and I can’t count all the short stories that have been produced there before that. I write well in a well-tended garden. Maybe I should start making a habit of going to the botanical garden at Stockholm University, the Bergianska, when I return. As a way to get my thoughts straight. I don’t do yoga – I watch trees.
Katja Malmborg 