Life, with the garden
Location: Helsinki, Finland • • • Visit: May 2017
It was a chilly day in May, spring just arriving. I was fascinated, having just been in Glasgow where everything was in full bloom, the sun had been warm and where reading on a bench in the botanic garden, only wearing t-shirt and jeans, was perfectly comfortable. Not here. Mittens and hat were needed in the Helsinki May weather, even though it isn’t that much further north than Scotland. I guess it’s the Golf stream versus the lingering Siberian winter air masses. Really nice, though, in the Kaisaniemi botanic garden with the blooming spring flowers, wood anemones, pasque flowers, scilla and tulips. Lily buds, just like the ones in my Finnish grandmother’s garden, promising a fiery summer. Strange and exotic plants are fascinating, yes, but there’s a special kind of magic in the flowers of childhood.
The greenhouses in the Kaisaniemi botanic garden are made up of a main lush tropical palm house and several adjoining smaller greenhouses housing plants from biomes such as the Mediterranean and deserts, a water lily pond and even a gorgeous little room completely dedicated to African violets. My Swedish grandmother used to have these in her living room window – but did you know that they originate from Tanzania and Kenya? Just imagine, the journey they made, as a species, to get from a moist patch next to a small stream in a remote tropical forest in inland Tanzania to my grandmother’s windowsill in Vårberg in the 1980s. The stories about travel and fashions and colonialism that our potted plants could tell.
Katja Malmborg 