Last summer, two of my friends set off on a road trip to Finland. When I checked in with them after a week or so, their van had already broken down twice. But they were in Sweden, having a great time anyway. A few pictures loaded into the chat; a little fan of images. There was a vast meadow, a country house with gauzy white curtains, an assemblage of rustic wooden chairs, and the Hijet getting loaded onto a Swedish tow truck.
I had agreed to look after the garden for three weeks while my friends were away. It was a bit far from home—about an hour using public transport or about 30 minutes zooming euphorically downhill and then crawling pathetically uphill again on my bike—but I was happy to be there. I’ve always found gardening to be a nice antidote to the seriousness of my day job.
There’s a sense of letting go in gardening; nature can only be fenced in so much. In this garden, moon vines were quietly growing up and around every vertical surface.
Flowers planted in one spot stretched out their stems over the walking path or spontaneously popped their heads up somewhere else.
A bunch of Queen Anne’s lace had long ago forced its way up through the pavers, blooming like a green and white firework.
The surprising, improvisational result of careful sowing, weeding, and watering is—to use a word that feels worn-out by work—delightful.
Plus, directly touching the plants, tools, and dirt makes the work a lot more tangible than pixels on a screen. The plants have a kind of total composition that’s so much different from the buttons and menus I make at work: the moon vine is tender and fine, with big, soft, white flowers. The Queen Anne’s lace is prickly and maximalist and, for some reason, a paradise for flies.
It’s very hard to replicate the aesthetic pleasure of a moonvine on-screen. The composition suffers from a lack of texture. There’s no wind or rain inside a smartphone.
The garden is a “Schrebergarten” (roughly an “allotment” garden in English), meaning that, on the small plot of land nestled among dozens of other plots, there rests a single-room house that (in contravention of the typical Schrebergarten regulations) has a comfy twin-size bed where I lay flipping again through the photos beaming in from Sweden, trying to figure out what kind of rough-hewn utensils I saw on the country house’s kitchen counter.
It was a hot, hazy, almost delirious afternoon in Zürich, constantly threatening to rain on the flowers and vegetables I had just watered. A friend once told me that the swallows flying around outside would always fly closer to the ground just before rain, because that’s where the bugs were. I wondered if they—the swallows and the bugs—also felt so enveloped by the hot, heavy air. I wanted to take a nap.
As I started to doze off, I remembered I had bought a quarter of a watermelon on my way out to the garden today. It was resting there on a little white kitchen table not unlike one I had in my old apartment, with a chair and stool set made of metal tubing and a red resin laminate. Staring over at the chair for a moment, I opened my phone’s camera app and snapped a picture to look up what kind of chair it was.
Part of a kitchen table set from the 1960s; the resin laminate, Kelko; designer unknown.
I felt unsatisfied.
Now I knew some facts about the chair, but for what?
Like countless flowers, plants, and bugs I had identified before it, the chair was now a piece of information, somehow smaller in my mind than it was before I knew anything about it.
I liked the chair more when I was sitting on it earlier.
I fell asleep.
