A Garden in Austria

What on earth!

Only yesterday I thought summer would arrive tomorrow, and here the snow has piled down again. It snowed all night, and by morning it had completely covered the ground, the trees and the bushes.

And the birds were chirping at full volume; insects were flying about, buzzing. In the garden the nectarine had already burst into bloom. The whole tree was in flower. Now, of course, the fruit will die.

The pears were on the way, the peaches were about to blossom. Well, it's a good thing that didn't happen: they sensed the bad weather and clenched their already swollen little buds.

Of course, tomorrow there will be no snow, it will melt, but the closeness of the Alps makes itself felt not only through the mountain air but through such tricks of nature as well. For me, used to the middle geographical belt and a continental climate, such sharp changes in the weather are unusual. Only a few days ago the mercury reached twenty degrees above zero. Everything was crying out with warmth!

I went out into the yard, and instead of the car there was a huge snowdrift! Just like in Russia... I took a broom (I keep thinking a snow brush is of no use in Austria and every time I'm wrong) and set about sweeping the snow off the bonnet and the roof of the car... From the outside such a performance must have looked funny. Whoever was peeking at me from their windows was surely smiling sweetly: this Russian has gone and done it again.

Well, what can you do? You can't very well sweep snow off a car with a mop.

All right, enough; the main thing is to clear the windows, and the rest will fly off by itself during the drive.

I need to drive around a bit and see what has become of spring nature.

For many years I believed that tulips were those nondescript little flowers with small buds of various colours - red, white, yellow - that are sold on the eve of the 8th of March. The price of one little bouquet, as a rule, equals the cost of a whole flowerbed on ordinary days.

Before, it never even crossed my mind that tulips could come in delicate shades. And that a single bud could have two colours, or even three.

They can have different leaves: short, long, narrow, lance-shaped and so on. And all this beauty is called tulips.

How far they are from the tulips sold in Russia on the 8th of March. As far as the Decembrists were from the common people.

Just look at the bouquet at the bottom of the note....

In the vase there are only amaryllises (red) and tulips.

And the tulips are quite different and very unlike one another. What amazes is the delicate red one, whose petals are folded in several rows.

And so I wonder...

Why, on the 8th of March, do the shops and flower kiosks not sell wonderful flowers like these to delight our women?

Fate belongs not only to people. Every object has it, even a roadside stone. I won't even mention worn-out slippers or some shabby dressing gown.

I am watching one little apple tree with a very unusual fate. I bought the apple cutting about five years ago. And the very next year I was harvesting, each apple weighing 500 g. There were so many apples, and so heavy, that the fruit simply broke the top off. Of course it was a pity.

It seemed that one could write that tree off, but unexpectedly a side branch began to grow strongly. Then I took that branch and tied it to the fence. The side branch became the trunk, and what had been the trunk turned into a broken side branch. After that I cut off all the other small twigs on the trunk and whitewashed it, so that the shoots wouldn't press against the fence and the tree could go on developing. And it grows. This year it blossomed again, and I am waiting for a new harvest.

I noticed one peculiarity. If a branch suddenly meets an obstacle, the first branches run into it. But the following ones seem to see the obstacle: they grow right up to it, and then suddenly the branch turns through 90 degrees and begins to grow upward or sideways so as not to collide with it. For me this was very surprising, I would even say a revelation; it gives the impression that the tree possesses intelligence.

P. S. The photo shows that very apple tree.

I first tried kiwi in Paris, when after defending my candidate's dissertation I wanted to treat myself and decided to visit relatives. It was my first trip abroad, if you don't count the fact that I was born in Germany.

On my first visit Paris did not appeal to me, but that's not what this is about....

At lunch a dish of assorted fruit stood on the table, and among it I noticed one that looked very much like a potato, but in shape and size was very like an apple.

I didn't know how to eat it. So I made do with peaches.

Suddenly my niece took that very fruit, cut it in two halves with a knife and began scooping out the inside with a teaspoon.

I did the same; the fruit reminded me of a gooseberry. But on the whole, nothing special.

As I found out later, this fruit was called kiwi. At that time it did not exist in Russia, and to people of the middle belt it looked like an utter curiosity. (Later people began breeding it, and now it grows in the Krasnoyarsk region, in Transcaucasia, and in other subtropical and tropical places.) But

after a while it appeared in Russia too. Nobody knew exactly how to eat it. I watched a scene where people bit it, peeled it, chopped it into pieces, but nobody guessed to cut it in two halves.

Looking at this fruit, I imagined that it grew on some tree, from whose branches the kiwis hung.

But the reality, as it turned out, was much more prosaic. Kiwi grows on tree-like vines; it is not even a fruit, but an ordinary berry.

And now I have planted a kiwi in my garden; it has taken root and is already putting out strong shoots. I hope to taste the home-grown berry next year.

I always wanted poppies to grow in my garden. Not annual ones, but perennial. Big, large, bushy. I remember poppies blooming everywhere in my childhood. There were no drug addicts, and nobody hid the poppies; they simply grew for beauty.

There were especially many of them along the banks of the Kazanka River, on the high bank where my house stood and from which the whole floodplain could be seen. The feeling of childhood, in fact, is tied precisely to poppies and the river.

Then somehow everything changed all at once and growing poppies became forbidden. Once I had a dacha on the Volga, where I decided to grow poppies. But when they began to ripen, a cultured drug addict came up to me and very politely asked permission to pick the poppies.

Well, what could I do? I allowed it. If I had refused, he would have picked them anyway, only in my absence, and done damage on top of it.

In Austria there is no ban on growing poppies, so I decided to plant poppies of different varieties. I was drawn most of all to poppies with pink and blue petals.

Strange to say, we couldn't order blue poppies even in Germany. Their seeds were bought up very quickly. We planted others - red and pink. The white ones for some reason didn't take.

And then, walking the dog, I saw a blue poppy growing in a field. At first I wanted to dig it up and plant it in my own garden. But then I changed my mind.

Let it bloom! Why part it from its home.

About four years ago I planted a persimmon. In German the persimmon fruit is called something very funny - Kaki (stress on the first syllable). However, this has no effect on the taste of the fruit, which is juicy and sweet.

Strange as it is, in Austria little is known about it, and people only became acquainted with it in recent years. Possibly because the fruit is considered Turkish, and Austrians rarely look into Turkish shops. Not long ago persimmons began to be sold in ordinary shops too. And the Austrians began to buy them, only they have still not learned to eat them properly.

It is amazing to watch Austrians peel the skin off the soft fruit and eat the oozing pulp with sticky hands.

Once, in the presence of Austrians, I ate a persimmon with the skin on, and they looked at me with interest:

- Look, the Russian eats persimmon with the skin.

In the neighbourhood where I live nobody plants persimmons, simply because they don't know what to do with them. People gaze at the exotic tree growing in our garden.

The tree grows in most warm countries. It grows large, just like an oak! It lives long, about 500 years, and now I am beginning to think about whether to cut off the top.

By the way, the tree has a very beautiful dark grain. Musical instruments are made from its wood. The famous black ebony with its lovely pattern is also a persimmon. I have a mask made of this wood hanging on the wall, and now I want to get a table of the same kind. I'll eat persimmons on it.

Three years ago, near a forest path, I noticed a daffodil (how such a delicate flower ended up in the forest is unclear) growing in proud solitude. Around it there was only grass, with a few low woodland flowers peeking out here and there. Perhaps someone dropped a bulb and the flower sprouted; perhaps someone planted it deliberately near the path to make the forest even prettier (though how could it be any prettier!), and to delight passers-by with its presence (Austria has plenty of such eccentrics who plant flowers in the forest). There is also a third version: someone buried a cat on this spot and planted flowers around it. Nothing is left of the animal's grave, the “domestic” flowers did not survive forest conditions, but this one somehow made it.

But one day I saw that this part of the forest was going to be cleared and, besides, extra paths were to be made in the forest. They even brought in special machinery. In a day or two the tractors would roll right over the daffodil.

Then I decided to dig it up and plant it on our plot. There was a chance it wouldn't take in the garden: the soil is different, conditions are different, even the climate in the garden differs from that of the forest.

But the forest daffodil took root, which could not but please me.

Having settled in over a year, the flower sent up a shoot (it even changed visibly: the stem became longer and the bud bigger). And now instead of one daffodil there are as many as three growing! And it keeps putting out shoots. Which means the plant likes its new place.

Three years ago I bought a currant bush in a specialist shop. More precisely, by our understanding it wasn't even quite a bush, because it has a trunk and a crown.

The trunk is low, about 1.20 m, and from it the crown, that is the branches, spreads wide. In Austria not only currants are sold with such unusual “trunks”, but also gooseberries and blueberries, which grow in my vegetable garden, as well as other shrubs.

This year I was counting on gathering a good harvest from this “little tree”, all the more since there were great prospects for it: many buds had formed on the bush, which were about to open. But for some reason the crown dried up, although the trunk went on living.

At one point I even wanted to dig the bush up and plant another, more fruitful one in its place. But then I saw that soft currant shoots had begun to grow at the very base of the trunk. So I sawed off half the trunk with the crown and gave the shoots a chance to grow. Possibly a new currant bush will appear in this place.

I will keep watching.