I was never very big on gardening. Of course, I lived in the middle of Berne for 26 years. There wasn’t really any room to do anything with plants, except maybe houseplants. Now that we live in the ‘country’ there is.
Gardening
My favorite plants are those that don’t need a lot of care and are useful. That means we have fruit trees (plum and pear) along with blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. Every year we try out different vegetables; it seems tomatoes and zucchini are always good.
Last year we decided to go really healthy and planted broccoli along with some other stuff. After a while, when everything had started to grow we forgot that we had planted the broccoli. We harvested the other things and started to wonder what we had planted that had such huge, green leaves. Luckily we didn’t pull them out because one day, when we walked by we saw the broccoli in the middle growing happily. Ah, so that is what broccoli looks like. Yum, yum.
A couple of years ago I planted an avocado seed and now that’s growing. Who knows, maybe this year it’ll even grow an avocado.
Topiary
As you can tell, I tend to be a bit casual when it comes to gardening. I like it neat but it doesn’t have to be perfect, still not everyone sees it that way.
I like using what looks like a chainsaw to trim our hedges for two reasons. One, I don’t get to use ‘big-guy-machines’ very often and two, I only have to trim once a year. I’ve seen people in our neighborhood trimming their hedges with what looked like baby scissors. Which brings me to the subject of topiary, or the practice of clipping shrubs.
I’ve never seen any animals shaped out of bushes in the neighborhood, which I admit would be cool. We do have neighbors who like not only neat, but rounded bushes. It gives the neighborhood a nice, groomed look. Ahem, Swiss look. Well, at least we have a robot mower so the grass doesn’t get too long. And, once a year our hedges look nice, so what more could you ask for?
The situation is a bit different in America. It seems that you can’t do what you want there. My sister said that their homeowner association wrote her a nasty letter recently. They thought the wreath on their door was out of season. The bird, which my sister said was the state bird, looked too Christmassy. She said they also wrote her son, who lives in the neighborhood, that his grass was too long. Wow. She took it all in stride. ‘They’re just doing their job, trying to keep the neighborhood clean and tidy.’ It makes me realize just how lucky we are in Switzerland that we don’t have those kind of associations here.
The Ugliest …
When my parents came to Europe my dad saw his first 2cv (deux chevaux). In case you don’t know what that is, it’s a French car. He said that was the ugliest car he had ever seen. Okay, they are pretty ugly but Europe has more to offer than only ugly cars. Believe it or not, they have ugly trees.
Trees are regularly trimmed so they don’t exceed a certain height or width. The practice is called pollarding. The word stems from the word ‘poll’ which originally meant top of the head. So originally the verb ‘to poll’ meant to crop the hair. It grew to mean to crop the top of anything, like a tree, for example. The ‘ard’ part of the word comes from someone or something that is that. Think ‘drunk’ to ‘drunkard’, ‘dull’ to ‘dullard’ or ‘wiz’ to ‘wizard’. Because languages have a tendency to change, later the noun was used as a verb. Now the verb is a noun. Go figure.
Back to the ugly trees. Not that I have anything against pollarding or ugly trees, but trimming scars them. These scars grow into huge, unsightly knots. When they finally grow their leaves in the summer they look okay but that’s only half a year. The rest of the time they are just naked trees with hideous, ugly knots.
I thought I was the only one who thought this strange. When a distant relative of Ben’s came to visit from England she saw the trees. She whipped out her smart phone, laughed and said ‘I have to have a picture of this!’ So I guess this is not something that only I had never seen before.
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