Introducing the balcony garden, and me

I’d love to keep a garden diary - and I’ve decided this is the way I’ll do it. I’ve been making plans from the beginning: lists of plants I love, sowing schedules, vegetables I want to grow and collages of the future balcony. From now on I’ll share this process here, as well as a little bit about myself - but it’ll mainly be about the garden. I’ll post roughly every month about what I'm sowing, planning and growing in my tiny garden. This first post is about how gardening came on my path.

Medicine and gardening

I’ve trained as a doctor. I decided at the wise old age of 14 that I wanted to ‘work with people’ and that psychiatry would be my thing. I’ve always been interested in what goes on in the human mind and why we behave in certain ways (which is what I always said when people asked why). I’ve gone through medical school (summarized: the practical part was tough, do not recommend) and I’ve started my residency in psychiatry so I’ve kind of reached that goal. Strangely, I was correct at 14 that this is a good job for me, even though I couldn’t really imagine then what it was about (it is not about sitting in a quiet room and asking a person on a couch/comfortable chair ‘how does that make you feel?’).

When I started gardening, I felt that it was somehow similar to medicine, without knowing exactly why. Medicine turned out to be mostly about figuring out a difficult puzzle. All kinds of puzzles really, and not always fun ones: time management, administration, people screaming at me through the phone, to name a few. The fun puzzles are figuring out how to speak with people so they trust me, how to work better as a team without anyone feeling inferior, how to involve patients’ family members and how to gather heaps of information to formulate a problem and a suitable plan for it. And then doing it all over again, always readjusting because none of it is predictable. When it all comes together it’s a marvelous thing. Often it doesn’t and just parts of it work. That’s good too.

The way I see it, gardening is a puzzle too and when it all comes together it’s marvelous. You determine a goal and make a plan: planting for wildlife, growing food or cut flowers (I want it all). Problems arise along the way, which need to be solved. Disease strikes and you carefully investigate. Prevention can solve lots of problems before they arise (think of compost, drainage, watering). And there are always surprises: many problems aren’t really problems after all. Ladybirds come to eat all your aphids. Flowers that are ‘hard to grow’ turn out to be easy, whereas easy flowers don’t germinate at all. I also love that there’s always something new to learn. Perhaps all jobs involve solving puzzles and I’m imagining these similarities, but I feel a similar satisfaction when it all comes together and my garden is thriving.

I’m working and now I want a garden

My balcony is a 9 m2 rectangular concrete-and-steel structure in the city centre. When it’s not dressed with plants it’s a desolate and grey place, except for the beautiful neighboring red beech tree. In 2022 we moved to this apartment and my aunt gave me a sunflower seedling and a butterfly bush cutting, which didn’t do much in the fight against the bleakness of the place. I don’t think I watered very often either.

After getting my first real job after medical school and therefore having some money to spend, I started with a few plants in 2023. My boyfriend’s mom offered to take me to the garden center with her car, which felt like a great luxury. I remember we bought things like verbena bonariensis, alpine asters, echinaceas and the agapanthus I still have. Everything was pink, purple or blue. I grew one zinnia from seed but started so late it produced just two flowers before it got heavily mildewed (I know that’s not a verb but it should be, I feel it expresses how it suddenly happens and there’s nothing I can do). The dahlia tuber I planted gave me one gorgeous flower, which was barely visible at 5 cm from the soil.

Almost all plants suffered greatly when the balcony’s brick wall needed maintenance and they had to stay inside for a week, when it was really hot too. The small study was bursting at the seams, the door and window open day and night, and my boyfriend complained about the large amount of insects that crawled and spun webs over his computer.

I’m not working and now I really want a garden

Although I loved my little garden already (I missed it dearly and requested frequent photo updates when I was on a two-week holiday), I only really found out how passionate I was about gardening when I became ill at the end of the summer of 2023. I’d been working as a resident in psychiatry for almost 6 months, when I got a second bout of covid. What followed is long covid, an illness that affected many of my physical and mental abilities. I’ve not been able to work since and have been housebound for the last 1.5 years (this blog is taking me weeks to write but I’m really enjoying it!). While I was bedbound for a couple of weeks at the beginning of 2024, I decided I wanted to grow flowers I could always see from my bedroom window, no matter how sick I was. I longed for walks outside. The reality was I could barely walk, barely open the curtains because the light hurt my eyes and sounds hurt my ears. I wanted beauty and nature right in front of me, always.

I started by studying Sarah Raven’s book, ‘A Year Full of Pots.’ I couldn’t concentrate and processing any information gave me severe headaches so I read very small bits at a time. The first thing I grew was sweet peas. Not the easiest thing, you might think, but it was something I could start in February. Then it happened: I became addicted to seeing things grow from seed and to the idea that all those things would make my balcony wild and green. I bought more seeds: cosmos, lobelia and black-eyed Susan vine.

I bought dahlia tubers and ordered lots of perennials by mail, without ever having seen them in real life, which added to the surprise every time something flowered. There came a point that my boyfriend said ‘you can’t order any more pots or plants!’ but to my relief there also came a point that he gave up telling me to stop, because I wouldn’t listen anyway.

How I garden now

The garden is my big project. I can’t garden every day at the moment, my health fluctuates and currently I’m not well enough. I do go out there for a short round every morning and almost every afternoon, often taking my phone with me to take quick photos. I open or close the greenhouse, I pick a strawberry or tomato, I quickly deadhead some flowers with my hands. On days with more energy, I spend 15 to 30 minutes sitting outside, taking photos or videos, watering, planting something, sowing, adding compost or moving things around. Choosing to garden means that I can’t cook that day and can’t have visitors, two things I really love too (but not as much as gardening).

All those short moments in the past year together have created a balcony of which I’m endlessly proud. My life looks nothing like it used to and it really is hard. But I’m happy to say that my life currently is not all about being ill, it’s much more about being in the garden.

I feel that this poem says a lot:

The Gardener
Have I lived enough?
Have I loved enough?
Have I considered Right Action enough, have I
come to any conclusions?
Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?
Have I endured loneliness with grace?
I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.
Actually, I probably think too much.
Then I step out into the garden,
where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,
is tending his children, the roses.
Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings, p. 7
© 2012 by NW Orchard, LLC
First published by Penguin Press 2012