ANNE DAEMS, MY FATHER'S GARDEN

KENNETH ANDREW MROCZEK, THE MOON WILL FIND YOU

 

ANNE DAEMS, MY FATHER'S GARDEN

 

When I go visit my father the first thing I do is to go into the garden. Even in the middle of winter when there is nothing to harvest I put on some rubber boots, take a big red bowl and scissors and open the sliding doors. You can always find something: a half frozen red beets, sprouted turnip leaves, rosemary and rue. With the shovel I dig up burdock roots. Then I cut off some cherry blossoms and forsythia branches which start blooming a few days later in a vase in my apartment in Brussels. White, pink, yellow.

When the garden transfers from winter into spring, I like to look at my father when he turns the moist soil, sometimes he finds a daikon that survived winter or a Jerusalem artichoke.

I remember when we were young, after he had worked in the garden on a beautiful summer day, he cooked up a delicious and festive supper with only the weeds he pulled out.

With a saw he cuts off dead branches of an old apple tree and afterwards puts cement in the holes to prevent it from rotting. Cementing is probably the thing he likes second best after making green tea.

In his garden he has built two Japanese tea pavilions. Although he's Flemish he practices tea ceremony very seriously and teaches Japanese women dressed in beautiful seasonal kimonos. The smallest pavilion (tatami) is my favorite. It’s based on teigyokuken, designed by Kanamori Sowa in the 16th century. There is a little window in the celling where the full moon shines through on cloudless nights, lightning up the teapot on the charcoal fire or my pillow, when I stay overnight.

Anne Daems, in Here and there, #8, 2008

 

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