I have a Garden, a Garden House, an allotment in Copenhagen, not too far from the city centre, yet it feels like it is far away from the world. It’s my Garden of Eden. Before the allotment, I never had Green fingers or a longing for Grass, Plants, and Flowers, Trees, Bushes, Insects, I do now, it is my happiest joy and hard work to take care of the little Garden, I love it!
I have though always loved Garden Art! Garden Literature, the Secrets of Gardens, Gaden designs and architecture, Garden history, but have never associated it somehow with myself. Now I do, and somehow in all I write, draw, explore there is a Garden.
My biggest Garden inspirations is from the Middle Eastern Garden’s architecture and history to the Pre-Raphaelite’s inviting and haunting and extreme Garden beauty – I had the change to croquis draw in the Studio of Leighton house in London, so flowery and blooming – and also the old Raphaelite painters’ Gardens and landscapes, and especially pulling is Uccello’s forest hunts. And even though British cottage Gardens and Versailles mesmerizes me, a Garden Artist as Charles Jencks is so inspiring.
For Garden literature, my heart already from an early age was touched by the short stories of J. P. Jacobsen, who also was the first one to translate Darwin into Danish. Henry James’s ‘The Other House’, of course E.M. Forster, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. And who have mentioned more flowers or plants than Shakespeare. When visiting the New York Botanical Garden, there is a part which contains most of the more than 400 different species of Plants, Flowers, Herbs from his plays and poems, and that for me has always been the ultimate idea, too have a Shakespearian Garden with all from exotic roses to parsley. There is a deep celebration of these writers in my work and being.
Howards End is still one of my favourite Garden films; the opening scene especially, I have that feel often walking around in my own little Garden in the dusk, being content in the moment, in the stillness of it.
When I got the Garden House my life changed, and a sense of home for the first time settled properly in me. Maybe the House and Garden fixed itself in me, more than I stepped into it, or maybe it’s mutual, for sure it’s magical, and every year with more flowers and tiny wildlife. The Garden and House is my sanctuary, my Greenhouse my impossible proudness because of the two wines, the tons of rocket salad, and only a tomato or two a year. I have planted herbs all over, for cocking, for smell and for the insects.
The weather is always such an influential part of having a small Garden, for good and bad and if anything I think the Garden has inspired me to write and write a lot, to continue to write and that’s why I have written: the long illustrated poem-text ‘Som Blind Passager…’ (As A Blind Passenger…) and the monologue inspired dramatic text ‘Elektra på Græs’ (Electra Grassing) and the illustrated Poem ‘Rosy’.
This year I go for a morning walk everyday through the trees and along the water – the Garden House is close to the water – with my morning coffee thinking, rehearsing, rereading, editing, and plucking bouquets of wildflowers for the Garden table.
