It is raining. I’m sitting in the new apartment, by my old desk, Natalia came to visit yesterday and she said “You’re a city girl now” and I guess that’s true. I live just inside the “tullarna” (=tollgates), as the Stockholm definition of the city stands. I am surrounded by mostly hard-made surfaces and flowerbeds, not forests, and it’s raining.
It makes me think of this spring. It was intense, for many reasons – but one of the nicer ones was that I got to visit as many as five botanical gardens in three different countries. The first, a revisit to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh on a sunny day in the beginning of May.
In a way, one could say this is where it all started: My collection of botanic gardens. Sure, I had visited others before, mainly during my 2012 North America travels starting in Edmonton, Alberta, and ending in Phoenix, Arizona. But there, it had not gotten systematic yet. For one, completely missing the garden in San Francisco, which is supposed to be one of the best in the US, even though that was the city I spent most time in during my trip, is completely unforgivable.
No, it was during my visit to the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh in 2013 that this obsession was really born. Together with dad, we marveled at the lush June flower beds, and how every single corner of the garden seemed to have a plan, every nook a place to discover strange and exotic plants in. And there was no entrance fee! This artistry and garden of knowledge open for anyone to enjoy – a true place in the middle of the city to reconnect to the biosphere in (as I would learn to put words to just a couple of months later when I started the master’s programme at Stockholm Resilience Centre).
After saying goodbye to dad, I then continued down on the continent and visited seven other botanic gardens, but none of them could beat Edinburgh. And revisiting it now, my opinion about it did not change. It is a beautiful place, and I could spend days there, roaming the groves and studying the intricacies of the tropical plants in the greenhouses.
Or sitting on a bench under the hanging branches of this tree, reading “Ancillary Justice” by Ann Leckie, breathing in the fragrant, humid air – for a moment fooling myself that I could be in an exotic place about to go on an adventure. Escapism, I guess, in a way – but what is wrong with that when it makes your heart beat slower and your breathing suddenly feel lighter.
I believe in the calm of a leaf. And the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh has leaves in plenty.
Katja Malmborg 