“Dead bushes,” I muttered. “We need to do something about it.”
It had been more than a year since the pandemic started and I was looking through the window of our condo at the lifeless branches dangling outside.
“Why don’t we get rid of them and plant some flowers? We work from home a lot and it would be nice to look at something pretty.”
“Sure! Why not?” said Julia who barely disagrees with my ideas, no matter how unreasonable they are. And let me tell you – pulling out dead bushes with just the two of us and one rusted shovel was a completely crazy idea.
Yet, unknowingly, I was about to unlock something that would bring me so much joy and become one of my favorite pastimes.
When I was a kid, I would often spend time with my mom in our flower garden, plucking the weeds, turning up the soil, and taking care of flowers and plants, all while chatting about different things in life. As a kid, I did not think much of it. I was simply helping my mom with the yard work, but now, looking back, it was something more, allowing us to bond as a mother and son over shared work and something beautiful. Also, in those early formative years, the love of gardening was firmly planted (pun intended) in my identity.
But then, as always, life happens. High school, college, move to the US, college, law school, jobs, travels. There was no place for gardening in my busy, adult life.
Until the pandemic hit and I was staring at the ugly dead bushes outside of our condo.
What happened afterward is not difficult to guess. Working from home, we had more time to spend around the condo and my childhood knowledge of gardening has come to the surface. We spent one sweaty and back-breaking day pulling dead bushes and roots out of the ground and then started to plant flowers.
People tend to react surprised when they hear me talk about flowers. Somehow, they don’t associate me with gardening. But I can talk for hours about zinnias, peonies, asters, or whatever is blooming or about to bloom at the moment. For me, this topic is as relevant as the latest political news or last night’s Blackhawks game score.
Julia and I once stood in a queue waiting to enter a high-rise during the Open House Chicago event. The building was popular, and the wait was long, so each of us drifted in our thoughts. When Julia snapped out of it and looked at me, she noticed I was still deep in contemplation with the corners of my lips frozen in a half-smile.
“What are you thinking about?” She asked.
“Dahlias.” I blurted out, caught completely off guard.
The newfound hobby of gardening brings me so much pleasure. When I work from home, I can take a break to go outside just to admire flowers for a minute or two. The local gardening centers became my default place of joy, where I can drop by just to see what new flowers are in stock and to chat with the employees about anything flower-related. Needless to say, I talk to my mom on the phone every week, and we discuss flowers and share pictures of whatever is blooming in our respective flower gardens at the moment.
If you are wondering why I am writing this in a travel blog, this new hobby also affected the way we travel. Like Julia, who travels in search of pottery on our trips, I now pay more and more attention to parks, botanical gardens, and conservatories and try to add them to our itineraries. In the last two years, we’ve been to some truly incredible places. In Medellin, we visited the botanical garden, exploring the rich world of Colombian plants with orchids being the main show. In Ireland, at Powerscourt Estate, which we visited in late August, there was a dazzling display of dahlias and hydrangeas of so many shapes, sizes, and colors that I walked away with at least a hundred of pictures on my phone. And then of course, Grenada, with its abundance of bromeliads, heliconias, and alpinias, growing outside and filling the air with intoxicating tropical aromas. The new pastime also made us explore our own town. We now regularly pay visits to the Chicago Botanical Garden and recently visited for the first time the Garfield Park Conservatory, the place that we somehow managed to miss despite living in Chicago for so long. Both places present an astonishing variety of flowers and plants and are well worth a visit.
Last year, we started to plant tulips. Tulips are great because they allow to stretch the gardening season in Chicago by a month or two, starting it early. I consulted with my mom over the phone, who told me to plant tulip bulbs in late fall and wait for them to bloom in early April-May. Our first attempt was a very careful one, with only a handful of bulbs planted. We then anxiously waited for tulips through winter and early spring, constantly checking for their arrival through the window of our condo. The tulips did not disappoint and gave a solid month of blooming. After getting an impressive result on our first attempt, last November, we got bolder and planted more tulips to receive an even more impressive sight this spring.
And then, last month, we flew to Amsterdam to ….
Next week, read about us being lost in the sea of tulips!
