What brought me here

There is a joke in my family that I, the oldest child, was destined to love plants from the moment my parents met – which was in a place called “Gardener’s Island”. Later, they came to the part of the country where I grew up through a guy they met at a horticultural show. Bought a house in a street with the word “garden” in its name. I could, if I wanted to, also make a connection to my first name.

15 months old and already clutching the watering can.

Whether they’re omens or funny coincidences, plants and gardens were certainly one of my biggest passions early on. My first memories are of herbs drying on the attic, climbing a storm-damaged tree, eating chives in the garden. Toddler pictures show me with watering cans and fistfuls of weeds. The first Christmas present I remember was a wooden tractor with a working seed drill.

Letters and words came into my life around the same time houseplants began to feature more prominently. I remember the plants in my room at that time more clearly than the furniture, I remember playing among the larger potted plants in the other rooms. I remember learning to read, to write, picking up the first English words from two neighbour girls and their mother, I remember making up my first secret alphabet…

My mother claims there was a time when I didn’t like to read, but I don’t remember it. If I didn’t like to read in primary school, why would I have read my first plant book and started to criticize my parents for constantly confusing bindweed and vetch (which have similar names in German)?

By the time I was a teenager, Letters and Leaves had me firmly in their clutches. The Letters filled up my bookcase in the form of the books I gobbled up, and my notebooks in the form of stories, languages and alphabets I made up, my head with English, Latin and Spanish. The Leaves filled my extra-broad windowsill with double rows of houseplants, the garden with vegetables as I worked alongside my father, and my head with the tentative idea of doing something like this for a living.

But it took me years to take that step. I went on to school, much longer that I’d have liked, collecting more books, stories, languages, more plants, both indoors and out. I even went on to university, but after a few months there, I decided I’d had enough of sitting on my butt and studying. I dropped out and started looking for an apprenticeship.

Four years later, I’m a journeywoman horticulturist, owner of hundred houseplants and four hundred books, working on more stories than I care to count, setting up a blog so I’ll have a place to ramble about my passions.