replanting

“Aw!” ‘What?’ “Aw just… somebody’s torn this little plant out, and now it’s gunna die.” I could hear my surprised, injured tone of voice, high like a disappointed child. My friend stopped and I had already squatted in front of the dismal garden bed built round the trunk of a tree, in which someone had planted four or five tiny evergreens and a wilting marigold. It was two degrees this morning; I had on leather gloves. Ideal for scraping out a hole in the soil. Took up the tiny shrub, lying on its side in what seemed to me a foetal position, and stowed it in it new hole, tucking soil around its roots and talking to it as I pressed the dirt into place. “There you go, that’s better…” I stood up, brushing my gloves against one another, and turned back to my friend and our conversation. A woman on a bicycle had stopped to watch. She gave me this head-tilting, compassionate look with two very very slow blinks of her eyes, acknowledgment.

At home on my kitchen windowsill I have a shred of pelargonium stolen from someone else’s window box, a present for a friend who cannot keep sprigs of basil from the supermarket alive yet dreams of being a gardener. He only has a tiny, bricked-in, West-facing balcony that looks dismally over a supermarket car park. I’ve shown him photos of how, in an Australian climate at least, you can grow a lot of food in such a space. When I saw this still-flowering window box with not just red and pink but also the darker, sultrier, more sophisticated velvetty maroon flowers, I filched a bit, peeled from the undermost hem of the plant where the person caring for it would lose least enjoyment. A few paces further on I found an empty plastic cup. Scooped up a cupful of leaves for the bottom layer and then a handful of rich dark friable soil. Stowed the incipient plantmonster in there and will nurture it until it has begun to send out some roots, hopefully before I leave Berlin, so then it can be passed on to its new owner with hopefully some chance of surviving the grey winter.

As a child in the tropics I used to worry about the trees, who seemed to me buried to the neck in hot, foetid soil, unable to move, >trapped!!< It took me years to work out that this kind of simple projection is not really compassion, does not help anyone. Years, and some lambasting from a Tibetan Buddhist nun who yelled, “You have too much compassion & no wisdom! No wisdom!” In any case one imagines suffocating heat is less of a problem for a German tree.