Today I planted a garden at the Tractieweg. Well, not as to say ‘planted’ – to plant is almost impossible, remember the Google maps picture a few blogs ago?  The hard surfaces you see there are overgrown, but have not disappeared. They resist the spade and the hoe very effectively.  So, when the gardening genes kicked in, I had to go about it in a creative way, which I did.

First I collected all the seeds I could find. In my own garden, in the park, everywhere. They ranged from horse chestnuts to rhubarb seed  to poppy seeds, anything that I could lay my hands on. Then I added some colour to the mix by going to the garden center and buying seeds of plants that are suitable for a ‘fire and forget’, and that hopefully will give this outdoors lab of mine some colour next spring.

I walked around scattering the seeds and picturing a nice mix of grasses, weeds and flowers next year. If cleanliness is next to godliness, I think that gardening must be  godliness itself – I felt like the Creator on the first day.

To remind me of things to come I put the little sachets the seeds came in on the window of my atelier. Then noticed that I had made  a garden of sorts – superimposing the flowers on the dreary wasteland outside turns out to be my first exercise in making a garden ‘of the mind’.

“Paradise haunts gardens, as it haunts mine” (Derek Jarman)