How I started my journey into the World of Flowers
Chapter 1. When I grew up back in the 70s in the suburb of Vällingby west of Stockholm, the development where my mom & dad built our house was flanked by a smaller forest, and some meadows. An old since long closed railroad track stretched behind the meadows, where we played as children. It was the days when kids were sent outside to play, just to be asked to be home before it got dark. No cellphones to keep track of us. I loved to be there. With friends, or just by myself. It let our imagination run free. To walk through tall grasses, feeling the textures of the different grasses with my hands and Daisies and Bluebells peaking up stretching for the sunlight. I picked flowers all the time. In the meadow the daisies, blue bells and wood crane’s bills & Queen Anne’s lace. In the forest small blue & yellow violets in the crevasses of the rocks.
Bringing them home and finding small vases to put them in, filling up water, it brought me such joy. The flowers spoke to me in a way I can’t explain, but today I know it shaped me into the person I am today. You wish all children could grow up with warm memories like this. We had a garden.A quite big one I think, we lived on a corner lot. I also had grandparents who rented a summer house outside Enköping, where I spent summers & school breaks surrounded by fields of grains, where Bachelors buttons and Poppies colored patches in the hues of pale yellow beige straws of Oats, Wheat & Rye swaying in the wind.
At the summer house we had raspberry patches, pear and apple trees, wide borders of flowers flanked by gravel paths raked in straight patterns by my grandfather. Our bare feet got hardened by running across the gravel every summer, while playing all the imaginary scenarios you could think of, building forts and eating too many of small grey pears until our tummies hurt and time was spent in the outhouse! We could drive a few minutes to Lake Mälaren, to swim and play. I have been so lucky. This time shaped me.The love of nature. From the summer house we could walk in rubber boots up to the church across the big road, through the cow pasture ( where I could pick the small yellow Cowslips) & into a thick ancient forests to forage for mushrooms, especially the bright yellow Chanterelles, that we later fried in butter and put on crispbread and ate in the vintage kitchen with the low ceiling. It’s one of my absolute favorite things with Sweden, our right to walk through and forage from the woods, no one can tell you no. It’s called Allemansrätten. It means “ Right to public access” or Freedom to roam”. Can there be a better way to grow up as a child?
In the textured sunny meadows and the softness of mossy forest floors is where my passion for flowers and nature was born.
