When F got
back from NZ, sunflowers had appeared in the garden; spindly sunflowers half a metre tall that
couldn’t hold themselves up. Half of
them survived. We saw people taking
buckets of water out to the garden. It
had by then an all-over crop of purslane.
F would have eaten that but had her reservations about it being a cat
toilet.
The
peppermint had not only survived, it was beginning to expand its
territory. Our upstairs neighbor started
going out early every morning with the hose from our building’s parking area
and watering the whole garden. Geraniums
bloomed. Hibiscus flowered (purple,
orange, pink – 3 of them by now), melons grew from seeds in F’s homemade
compost. The sunflowers bloomed; the kind
with flowers all over. F planted some
New Zealand spinach. The gazanias
flowered. Sunflowers dropped seeds and a
second crop grew up. They flowered in
September (and their seeds are already growing the 3rd crop which we
hope will flower in Spring). F put out
half a dozen chili plants.
F kept
digging out the grass and solanum. Some
rosemary got planted, survived, then thrived.
The peppermint started to smother its neighbours. F harvested spinach, bucketsful of the stuff,
and cooked and froze it for the winter.
Someone harvested ALL the chilies….. hmmmmmm….hhhhhot.
Eventually
the peppermint found itself on the banned list and F took 2 weekends to get
that out. When it was gone, coleus
appeared, and some plants with bulb roots like amaryllis. The gazania's seeds
have grown by themselves. We will have
hundreds of those next year.
All through
this people walking by or waiting at the bus stop across the road would tell us
how nice it was to have a flower garden here.
I mean, I like a garden, it gets me off the balcony, but these people
loved the flowers. F & I could watch them from the balcony: stopping to
look, picking basil or peppermint and walking on sniffing it. We saw one young man pick a whole bunch of
red geraniums one day. We hope his
girlfriend or his grandma liked them.
F calls it
a hotch-potch garden, but it has turned into a ‘hotch-potch’ that the community
has invested their interest in. We
really didn’t understand who or how much until one day we were pulling out a
few weeds when a woman stopped and chatted in Greek. We expected the usual light pleasantries but
she went into something that F’s Greek couldn’t follow and after F’s apology
she switched to excellent English.
“Thank-you”
she said. F replied that it wasn’t her,
but seemed rather to be a whole community of invisible people.
“I know”
said the woman, “I’m one of them. I’ve lived here (and she pointed next door to
us) for 32 years. In all that time this
has only ever been either bare earth or scruffy weeds and long grass. Now we have flowers. We have something nice and we realize that we
can achieve that for ourselves. We don’t
have to wait for officials to fix it.
However we only have that because you started it; so we thank you for
showing us how to have something nice for ourselves.”
After she
had gone we went indoors and F cried a little bit. I’m not really sure that I understand why
though….
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