Little garden

One of the things that motivated me to finally create this blog (aside from my birthday) was getting news from my elderly mother that she's planning to sell our little garden. This has made me very sad, and I really wanted to vent about it somewhere.

Growing up in Vienna in the 80s, my family spent its summers in our "Kleingarten" - this literally translates to "little garden" though I commonly see it translated as "allotment". I'm not sure whether that captures the meaning entirely, because it wasn't just a place to grow plants; it also contained a tiny house with minimal amenities, which essentially served as a lower middle class family's summer retreat. My family never went on holidays abroad - instead we'd spend the two months of Austrian summer holidays in this garden house every year.

To be clear, there wasn't anything luxurious about this setup. As I said, the house was very minimal; just a place to sleep at night and take shelter when it rained. We didn't have a phone line, couldn't receive mail in the early days, and when I was little the house wasn't even connected to the sewer system yet - anything flushed down the toilet just ended up in a sinkhole in the corner of the property that was emptied out every so often. The idea was that in the hot summer months, when the sun reflecting off the concrete the inner city made things unbearable there, we'd retreat to this little oasis seemingly in the middle of nowhere (though realistically, it was just the outskirts of town) to surround ourselves with grass and trees and not be so bloody hot.

As a little kid, I was mostly okay with this. I missed my best friend, whose family would spend the summer in their own allotment on the other side of town, but we'd write each other letters back and forth. And my hobbies as they were at that age - playing pretend, reading, drawing etc. - could be done in pretty much any environment. Plus I did like observing and learning about the plants and sometimes seeing small animals too. For a city girl, those months in the garden house provided me with more contact with nature than most of my peers, which I believe made me comparatively more resilient and knowledgable when it came to things like encounters with strange insects for example.

As I got older, I became less appreciative of the garden though. I wanted to watch TV, use my computer, go on the internet - not sit around in the middle of nowhere all day. At some point it became just my Mum who stayed there for most of the summer, while I stayed in our city flat at all times and limited myself to occasional visits. And of course, eventually I moved away entirely.

It essentially just became my Mum's hobby, and she would always update me about everything that was happening and proudly show off the currently blooming flowers whenever I came to visit. My older brother had lost interest in the garden long before I did and generally avoided it. It was always kind of clear that one day, she would get too old to keep taking care of all the work related to maintaining the house and garden, and that it would probably need to be sold, but that thought was always far away.

Hearing her say that she'd spoken to my brother about making arrangements after this summer was a bit of a shock. For all I know it could already be sold by the next time I get to visit her in Austria. And somehow, that's depressing, especially knowing that any new owner will likely raze everything to the ground.

The neighbourhood has changed a lot in the last forty years. What was once the middle of nowhere surrounded by nothing but fields is now just normal suburbs, and most of the surrounding allotments have effectively been turned into normal residential properties with large houses, swimming pools, tidy lawns and just the occasional tree or flower here or there. Our little house is not suitable for year-round habitation and would need to be rebuilt from the ground up to be able to serve a similar purpose. And nobody likes trees as old and tall as ours in that sort of environment.

The loss of the trees is definitely what's going to hurt the most. You see, our family had this thing where every person in the family had a tree planted in the garden just for them. There was something slightly superstitious about it as well, as I was told that the tree belonging to my older sister, who died at a young age, also withered and died after her death. I used to joke that "my" tree got fat around the same time I did. I used to look at my Dad's tree as something that still connected me to him after his death. So the thought of all those trees just getting cut down and destroyed makes me deeply sad.

In general, it's hard for me to convey just how much that little garden house shaped my early life. Basically anything you can think of that's related to summer - blue skies, warm weather, barbecues, the smell of cut grass, the sound of birdsong in the evening - will trigger memories of those summers in the garden for me. I knew that time was long past and that I was never really going to go back to how it was anyway, but it was still comforting to know that in some form, our little garden persisted.

As soon as I heard the news I thought about maybe arranging a trip to Austria sooner than I'd originally planned to maybe see the garden one last time, and I've not completely ruled out the possibility yet, but what would it even achieve? I've got plenty of pictures of everything, and it's not like I can take the trees home with me. I can't really argue against selling the allotment because it's not like I'm there to take care of it. It makes complete sense. It just sucks as well.