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The sun is shining again and I walk down to the center square in my neighborhood, I pick up books from the library and buy strawberries. Outside the local bakery, I sit down with a cappuccino and one of their wonderful, rich cardamom buns. I read the old children’s book “Where the wild things are” by Maurice Sendak, he tells: “the wild things /…/ roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws till Max said ‘BE STILL!’ and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all”.
And, being me, I think: I’ve thought about this, about gardens, about how to be. I have had people tell me they don’t like botanic gardens, because gardens are tame, restrictive. They prefer wilderness. But wild is not untouched by humans. Wild can be looking something in the eye and seeing it for what it is. And giving it space to be. A gardener tending to the unpredictable. A person looking at the world and moving with it, without giving up on the wild, the wonderful in their own wandering mind. Its strength, weaving it into the fabric of the world. This can be practiced in a garden.
Like the greenhouses in the historic botanic garden in Göttingen. Ferns that have been tended into microcosms of untamed greenery, a jungle in central Germany.
Photo: Alter Botanischer Garten in Göttingen, Germany, September 2017. Posted on Instagram August 2, 2020.
Katja Malmborg 