Life, with the garden
Location: Umeå, Sweden • • • Visits: May 2025
How the river water flows, a slow, familial conversation with the rocks that I am invited to listen in on, but not disturb while the sun, low in the sky, makes the bright light leaves of birch, willow and bird-cherry shine.
It is a narrow strip between river and hillside, trees leaning out over the path, as if they were reaching to join that never-ending conversation between the water and the rocks.
In a study I am working on, about people’s favorite places in nature (in the biosphere reserves where they live), one of the recurring images people relate, places that invite to deeper connection, are places pregnant with the sense of being completely surrounded by nature. Physically, they do not look the same. The place can be a mountain top, with views of mountain upon mountain all the way to the ocean. By a river at the bottom of a ravine, where large trees grow like the pillars of a cathedral to frame the ravine’s path. Or kayaking on a calmly flowing stream in the middle of an old agricultural landscape, where willows grow thick and impenetrable, leaning over the water like the walls of an airy tunnel, the air vibrating with bird-song. It is the being surrounded, encompassed, all sounds, smells, what they see: green, blue, alive. Like a room in nature.
This path, through Arboretum Norr by the Umeå river, is such a room. I have met my first favorite spot in this, to me, new biosphere reserve. Vindelälven-Juhttátahkka. I hope I will have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of more.
Katja Malmborg 