Wednesday, May 23, 2001
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Wednesday, May 23, 2001 |
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Memories link gardens across time and distance By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Freezing under gray German skies in March, 2000 despite the valiant efforts of daffodils, hyacinths and forsythia to make it spring, my thoughts often turned wistfully toward home. I was missing the explosion of flowering trees that announces springtime in north Georgia. My gardening friends were already cutting lettuce and spinach and turnip greens. Because I knew I'd be gone for most of last year's growing season, I didn't even turn over the soil, much less plant a seed. That skipped garden, the first in all the springtimes of my adult life, made working this year's all the more evocative. There's a lot of time to reflect as arms and back and legs strain together to open the earth and work it soft enough for the first leaves to push through to the sun. And when my daily inspection is at last rewarded by the sight of seedlings emerging, my memories go back to the victory garden my Daddy planted behind the back alley of our home in Harrisburg, Pa. One corner was mine for a few rows of radish seeds, a lesson in stewardship and patience for a child eager to see little leaves all in a row. Daddy's city garden was a forerunner of the three-acre "farm" my parents established when they moved us out of town and back to their rural roots, literally. Mom's specialty was strawberries. Her plants produced enough to freeze and make jam, and her ladies' Sunday School class always scheduled its June meeting at our house because Mom served fresh strawberry short cake for dessert. Even so, we had enough for me to set up a roadside stand to sell the excess to passersby. This year I remembered too the tiny neat gardens I saw while riding in trains from city to city in Germany. Every odd-shaped scrap of land tucked beside the railroad tracks contains a few rows of vegetables or a half dozen fruit trees, often with a small tool shed in one corner. They're Schrebergartens, named for the urban planner who developed the idea in the 19th century to help city dwellers become more self-sufficient. My friend Rainer says they provide a brief respite from city-living and a place to harvest fresh produce. Because most Germans live densely packed together in streets crowded with apartment buildings three to 20 stories high, the city or state leases out these little parcels of land, unusable for other purposes, and lets people cultivate them in any way they wish. Depending on the tenant's resources and time, I suppose, they can run from several rows of flowers and veggies to full-fledged mini-farms. One Sunday evening last March, I was walking through the generous city park in Gelsenkirchen where our daughter Mary lives, and at its farthest boundaries, discovered a fenced property that extended over at least ten acres. The gate was open, so I walked through, feeling a little like Dorothy stepping into the land of Oz. It had been a particularly pretty day, during which much work and care had obviously been invested in the Schrebergartens. Their tenants had gone home and I had a chance to take a really close look with no one to see me snooping. Each was fenced and either had its own water supply or shared with a few close neighbors, and most had little sheds where garden equipment is stored. At least that may be how they started out. Many of these "sheds" now are small summer houses with cooking facilities, bathrooms, a patio with lawn furniture on it. In other words, they are weekend getaways, and frequently very elegant. I paced off a few of the plots and found them to be about 60 X 90 feet the size of some building lots in Peachtree City! I suspect these are on the higher end of the scale and not necessarily representative of Schrebergartens elsewhere. Some had expanses of lawn with fieldstone walks, some trellises and espaliered fruit trees, some a charming mix of spring bulbs and vegetables. Here and there newly cultivated ground awaited seeds. There were little fishponds, fountains, often "lawn art," figurines of dwarfs or swans, which in Germany somehow seem not as tacky as they sound to us. Many seemed very old, judging by the size of their trees. Mary says she doesn't know how much they pay for them, but she doesn't think it's a lot. Except that the concept obviously predates the war considerably, they made me think of victory gardens. I realize now that the plot of ground where Daddy's garden grew did not belong to us either but was simply a vacant lot made available by the city. As a response to the war effort, it seemed so patriotic a thing to do, so American. I wonder if hard-working, patriotic city-dwellers like my father could have known about the Schrebergartens lying fallow in the rubble of German cities.
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