a rooskie in dublin

DISCOVERING MY INNER GARDNER!

by Irina Kuksova

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If you were lucky enough to live on your own during your student years you would probably remember those unavoidable holiday trips back to your parents' house. I mean, even students have to eat, right? Going to one's Ma's was the ultimate all inclusive.

In my case it was also inclusive of a strange greeting ritual which I dreaded, as it wasn't just my parents I had to greet. Having realised her lifelong dream in owning her own garden, me Ma just HAD to introduce me to every single representative of flora and fauna in her new green kingdom. Few things are so exciting for a 100 percent city girl, born and bred in an intelligentsia family, as being shown a basil. Even if it's a heck of a basil, and I have to admit, this is the most exquisite basil I have ever seen.

Now contrary to me, many Muscovites do have some interest in plants and such. In winter you can see all those high rise flats with glassed-in tiny balconies looking like miniature green houses. These five square inches are for the tomato pot and these eight for two cucumber plants. Perhaps we can squeeze in a little parsley and there would still be space for a chair, an ashtray and two clothes lines. Now you start to understand how me Ma's inner gardner suffered all those years spent in an apartment in Moscow, before her fazenda (dream garden) became available to her.

I'm not sure what strange magic exactly is at work lately. Having moved from an apartment to a lovely Irish cottage and come into possession of a patch of land myself, I started getting these weird urges. I try to throttle them. I keep reminding myself that all the plants I have ever had - gifts of course - are inevitably exiled to my Mum's house. But maybe, just maybe, next time I visit her, I will actually listen to her lecture on gardening. Get a few seeds. Start my own Irish fazenda...