There is only one papaya tree in my garden. It was tiny when we moved into the house, but when I cut away all the knee-high weeds surrounding it, it shot up and grew into a 3 meter high tree within one and a half years. And it grows the sweetest papayas I have ever tasted. No comparison to the supermarket variety.
I now need to step onto a garden chair to pick the fruits, which makes them all the more sweeter.
Papaya trees can have one of three sexes: male, female, or hermaphrodite. It’s the last one you want if you have a tiny garden like me, because hermaprodite trees grow flowers that can pollinate themselves. Female trees need a male nearby and lots of insects to pollinate their flowers to bear fruit, male trees can’t bear fruits at all.
By sheer luck this tree is self-pollinating. There was also a male one in a shady area that I chopped down and put into the compost… sorry mate.
I pick the fruit when it turns slightly yellow with still green spots mixed in and then let it ripen in my kitchen fruit bowl. The seeds are also edible and have a sharp mustardy/ wasabi flavor. I just pop them into my mouth as I peel and slice the papaya, but I have also seen recipes that use them for salad dressing.
Papaya has protein digestive enzymes, especially prevalent in unripe fruit. So that Thai special, the papaya salad, which uses green papaya is especially good as an appetizer to a big steak. I have also seen a chef on TV, who wrapped beef in papaya leaves for a few days to make it especially tender. I have yet to try that. I can’t bear to tear down the big leaves of our tree. They look so beautiful and sculptural at the end of their upturned stalks.
The birds love the tree as well. They land on the long leaf stalks and chirp loudly, probably to warn their friends of the white lion lounging below.
When I was in Kyoto more than ten years ago I made a big mistake. I visited the old town and a couple of beautiful temples and marveled at the beautiful red autumn foliage, but I didn’t visit any of Kyoto’s famous gardens. It was one of those squeezed-in-a -few-days-after-a-business-meeting trip.
To make my mistake even worse I stayed at a truly terrible business hotel in Osaka, which is close to Kyoto. If you are a road warrior you know what kind of hotel I am talking about: expensive, closet-sized room, musty bathroom, smelly (stale cigarette smoke with something more awful mixed in, and the whole night you wonder what it was that died under your bed), air-conditioning either too hot or too cold, and (help!) the window can’t be opened. After that you swear to yourself that you will never, never book your hotel room at the last minute.
I don’t want you to put off to visit Japan after reading the above. Normally, hotel rooms in Japan’s urban areas are tiny but spotlessly clean, and have free internet access (woohoo!).
Where was I? Japanese gardens. They are beautiful.
I have a coffee table book with beautiful drawings and pictures, which I recommend to any Japanese garden fan: Japanese Garden Design by Marc P. Keane. I think Japanese gardens appeal to the average European because they encompass design features that seem familiar to us. They are fenced in (that archtypical paradise garden), surprising after you round the next corner, abstract, and highly symbolic. Yet in other ways they are so different to what we know, and therefore exciting.
I didn’t go to Kyoto this time, but I stopped at every public garden we came across, and sucked in on all the details of road-side private gardens we went by.
A friend of mine likened Japan to the Galapagos Islands. A seed or animal flies in and adapts to its new environment, changes, and becomes something truly unique. The beauty of Japan is that it embraces outside influences,but every new impetus gets adapted to something truly Japanese. I think that is one of the reasons what makes Japan so interesting to visit. You recognize so many things, but see them in a completely new way.
Japanese garden design has strong Chinese influences, yet I bet you would instantly know how to tell apart a Japanese garden from a Chinese garden. A Chinese garden repaints an epic landscape in a highly artificial way, a Japanese garden distills the essence of it and does so seemingly effortless. Ok, that’s the ignorant Western short version, but you are free to dig deeper.
That’s the theory. Then you go to Japan and notice that space for gardens is limited. You walk through Tokyo. Skyscrapers, pavement, smelly cars, and endless sprawl with these gray apartment buildings. You stay in a hotel near Shinjuku Station, and discover the beauty of having your own, tiny, private space. And it has a bath tub. Japanese need bath tubs. As a Westerner (me at least) you are ok with a working shower. After I went on a pan-European business trip with a Japanese colleague I knew that a bath tub is essential for surviving, otherwise you will hear about it all through dinner.
But even in noisy, packed, central Tokyo, you round a corner and suddenly there is silence. It’s a quiet street. There are two storey homes right next to the high-rises. They have a tiny parking space (don’t ask me how they rear-park-oh no!-bang-park-their-car) and a highly clipped pine tree.
The average American home has one-millimeter lawn, the Japanese house has a tightly clipped pine tree or two, and Germans have their garden dwarfs.
The charming feature about Japanese cities are tiny plots in the middle of town with detached private homes. It makes these cities human. Other nice features are carefully clipped hedges in between skyscrapers. It’s built up in a higglety pigglety kind of way, which makes it kind of cute, like Japanese cartoon characters and cars. You know what I mean when you visit.
Normally when I am a tourist I walk a lot, this time I had a Toyota Prius. This has nothing to do with Japanese gardens, but why anyone would buy a Toyota Prius beats the :peeeeep: out of me. Ok, you save bucks at the gas station. It’s supposedly ecologically friendly, but if you look into what the hybrid battery is made off you know that’s not true. And then when you drive one, you know that any old Volkswagen is much better than this. For starters, they put the “hand” brake next to the gas petal down below, and when you try to find it with your foot you snap apart some loose fitted plastic thingy (black) and something more complicated looking ( white, possibly from the air-conditioning outlet). The visibility back into your rear-view window is minimal. The overall feeling is that of driving a U-boat . Driving through a city at minimal speed is OK, but when you try to get to Hiroshima from Kagoshima on the Expressway or drive along these beautiful curving roads on Kyushu, you notice that the Toyota Prius’ handling is truly awful. It’s similar to steering a cruise ship down a mountain creek.
Have you ever stopped at a gas station in Japan at 1.30am? You will be greeted by a gas station employee with a deep bow. He looks like he is about 75 years old, and you have the urge to serve him not the other way around. He bows again and shouts a lot in Japanese that you don’t understand. You keep thinking that your generation is no good at all. There is this feisty silver-haired man filling your car’s gas tank in the middle of the night while you are thinking about a nice soft bed. It’s all going down hill from now on for sure.
I apologize for being absent for so long. Thank you We’re Doomed for reminding me that it has been a while. That’s really no Zustand.
My Dad is finally out of the hospital. One foot is gone and during the summer his spirit was gone as well. I told him that we needed him foot or no foot, and I like to think that this is what pulled him through.
When we took care of my grandma who had Alzheimers and couldn’t walk anymore, we always agreed that her sitting in a wheelchair was the lesser of the problems.
The last words she lost was “Manno!” (hard to translate… “Eh! Man!”) Which told us that we had done something wrong. You can’t imagine how important it is to know that you have done something wrong.
My dad is my soul mate, which is unfair to say because my mum took care of me more than he did. She once said to me “For you, he can do no wrong”. No, he can’t, because he has the same faults as me. I know it’s unfair. For my mum, her soul mate was my grandmother, her mum, I can’t forget how much she cried when she died.
So that was the summer, but the autumn is definitely looking up.
Sometimes life reminds you that it is not all roses and that you really should hold, enjoy, and “einbrennen” (burn-into) your memory all that is and was good.
The garden is good. It’s full of mosquitoes and construction waste (gloves, concrete slabs, and iron bars), but harvesting yard-long beans and swinging my pickaxe to plant and move plants has been sweaty and satisfying.
Little man is the joy of my life. I don’t know if I will be his soul mate but he is mine. He just needs to smile and stand in front of me in his “Hochwasser” high-water pyjamas (“Yes, I have brushed my teeth!”) and all is good.
And there is so much more. I love life even if it has it’s up and downs and if you ever wonder… yes, go forward.
Remember the nice photos I posted of my newly setup veggie bed?
Well, the arugula has been eaten by a dozen caterpillars a few months ago. They looked beautiful, grass green with bright yellow stripes on their back. When I discovered them it was much too late. A woman from the local gardening society told me that they would turn into beautiful butterflies. Little bastards!
They also ate the Kailan (Chinese greens). The Japanese cucumber and string beans climbed up the bamboo sticks and look pretty, but there is not a single pickle nor bean in sight.
The surprising winners are the cocktail tomatoes and carrots from seeds I bought in Germany. Thirty juicy and sweet tomatoes and a dozen small but very orange carrots. I also put supermarket ginger into the ground and it sprouted. However the lemon grass, which was such a success in Dubai, withered and died.
I knew it would happen. Gardening is about learning and sticking with the winners. It takes time and experience. Next year my compost will be ready and I will dig it into the very clayie veggie bed. Every morning I will search for caterpillars. I will construct a raised bed, because tropical downpours will turn level veggie beds into ponds (with tiny cute frogs). And I will plant German carrots and tomatoes and maybe have a second go at Japanese cucumbers.
While the caterpillars munch the rest of my veggies, I watch a BBC series Around the world in 80 gardens. It’s enlightening. Gardening is like religion, so different around the world, but the concept is the same, we all like it and it makes us happy, in a weird BDSM kind of way.
I have been fifteen years in Hong Kong, but having this little garden around the house has been such a pleasure and new discovery. The veggie garden is a work in progress, but the rest, the so-called weeds, the plants that just sprout up after each rain, they are so pretty. The ones I like, I transplant to prime spots where they will strive and grow.
Whereas gardening in Dubai was about watering thrice a day, gardening in Hong Kong is about cutting down plants you don’t like at least once a month. I feel like Tarzan in a jungle with a machete… ok, huge -made in Germany- garden scissors. I also spray myself with “Deep Woods” mosquito repellent. It lasts for about 15 minutes until a colony of these little devils break out in laughter and descent on me.
And then they are the palm-sized spiders, and the creepy crawlies in the compost pile, and at least three geckos inside the house. I was raised by a mum who threw the spiders from the ceilings under our bath tub to eat the silver fish. Nature is about balance, and we are a part of it.
Little man and I observed our bedroom gecko tonight. George the Slow climbed up the wall, ambled past the curtains, and then stumbled behind the TV. The insect population in our bedroom will be kept at a minimum, my task in the equilibrium will be to wipe the gecko shit away.
Tomorrow little man and I will leave for Berlin where we will take care of my Dad’s garden. He is in hospital and half of his right foot is amputated, but in spite of this, and because of this, his tiny allotment garden is Eden and I will help my mum to take care of it. I am so ready for the pleasure of a temperate garden in summer. A bit of grass cutting and watering, how hard can it be?
Yesterday we went to the flower market in Mong Kok, which is a classical Asian shopping experience as it consists of 50 or so shops and stalls crammed into a very small area. It’s very convenient shopping, as you don’t have to walk far to see what the selection and prices are at the competition.
Lots of other people had the same idea. The sidewalks were crammed with people buying late Chinese New Year flowers.
I however was after this…
To put in here…
Last week I removed a lot of weeds, bougainvillea roots, and a lot of…
Now I have so many seeds that I better prepare the neighboring bed as well…
Other girls buy handbags, I buy plants. Although I was strictly on a seed buying mission, I couldn’t resist buying this strange creature…
It’s a staghorn fern that in the wild takes it’s nutrients from the bark of trees (in the back are pomelos). So I plan to put the fern up there…
Next to the flower market is the bird market. It’s housed in a very nice building surrounded by a traditional Chinese garden. I loved looking at the Chinese wooden cages, at all the colorful birds, and little man and I squeaked with delighted horror as we discovered the stall selling live grasshoppers. Some stalls however take hygiene a bit too lightly… it smelled, bird poo was mounting in the cages, and I had the urge to open them.
Please excuse the wobbles, I took the video with my phone.
Birds and grasshoppers were not the last fauna we encountered yesterday. When we came home, I noticed a very strong smell in the garden, then we heard some rustling and cracking up the hill behind our house. Urghh… burglars?
No, it was Elsie, having a late night snack. This morning I caught her on camera munching in our neighbor’s garden with long-neck birdie waiting for insects attracted by her not-so-Parisian smell. Elsie is a wild buffalo that roams through countryside and gardens with her mates. Later I saw three of her friends holding up traffic on the main village road. Yep, I live in the boonies, but the skyscrapers are only half an hour away.
I had one on my balcony in Hong Kong. When we moved in it stood there in a dirty gray pot, desperately hanging on to life. The family that had lived in our flat before us had left it behind. I hope it is still there. I couldn’t take it to Dubai.
I also planted one in my garden here. I figured that what had survived minimal care on my Hong Kong balcony also survives the desert summer. And so far it does. It’s not as fashionable a plant as an orchid, but whatever survives under my thumb has my respect.
