garden: 1 post

This year I once again couldn’t go to Ukraine. I miss my family, but I also miss our garden in Bereh. Over the years that I have been visiting my grandmother, I became a gardener in my own right, making my planting arrangements and tending to flowers. For my grandmother, the garden was a source of sustenance and a place of safety, and I too began to see it as our small paradise. Even when the news were dire, working in the garden calmed me and restored my spirit.

Being away from Bereh, I longed for such a place. In my apartment, there is a small balcony, but I also share a couple of flower beds in front of the building with others in the neighborhood. Since nobody wanted to take care of them, I decided to plant the flowers and herbs that evoked Ukraine for me. I bought seeds for tagettes, sweet peas, hollyhocks, marigolds, cosmos, nigella, basil, thyme and mint. I planted lovage and anemones, wild strawberries and roses. The space was too small for everything I wanted to include, but I tried anyway.

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