. . . on green shoots
AFTER A DECENT start last year I’ve let the garden, the tiny patch there is of it, go. Being that unholy trinity of an optimist, dreamer and procrastinator, I am still waiting for Diarmuid Gavin to ring my doorbell and sort it all out. The
bell actually makes a cuckoo sound, the better to cultivate that spring state of mind in the heart of winter. I sit and wait for the cuckoo and think how there’s one good thing about unwashed windows – you can’t see quite so much of a neglected garden.
I came into possession of some free bulbs over Christmas. An assorted lucky bag, most with names I didn’t recognise, others with no labels at all. They were supposed to be planted straight away but by the time my mother found them languishing in a corner of the kitchen it was a couple of weeks later.
She put them in the ground anyway. “We’ll see what happens,” she said. I watch their pale green heads poking out and I think about Janis Ruksans.
I met him last year while waiting for the midnight bus from Omagh. It was not as romantic as it sounds. He was with his friend from the Omagh Gardening Society who was seeing him on to the bus for Dublin Airport. We all got talking about how freezing it was and then his friend told me that Irish Timesjournalist Conor O'Clery had interviewed Janis in Latvia in the late 1980s during the protests for independence. Janis was standing on top of a car at the time. A tiny article subsequently appeared in this newspaper about the encounter. Now Janis was in Omagh to give a lecture about bulbs.
“He is a world-renowned expert on them,” his friend told me. I arranged my face so that it appeared suitably impressed by this news.
We got on the bus together. The lights were off and people dozed in that uncomfortable late-night coach kind of way. I sat behind the driver. Janis took a seat directly across the aisle. I got out my phone and Googled his name. An article appeared from a British newspaper all about Janis, this former journalist, nurseryman and gardening guru. “You are quite famous,” I whispered across to him, motioning to the article on the phone. He came to sit beside me. So began the most fascinating conversation I have had with someone on a subject about which I know nothing and in which I thought I had zero interest.
His interest in bulbs began when he was a child growing up in Latvia which, before the Iron Curtain lifted, was like the Holland of the Soviet Union. He would study them and seek out the most unusual ones. He is still only interested in the rare, the difficult to find, those ignored by other growers. At home in his nursery in Latvia he has the largest collection of crocuses in the world. He spends every spring searching for seeds in some of the world’s most remote places. He raises the seeds into bulbs and sells them by mail order.
He talked and I listened. His passion was captivating. He was tall and grey haired and he seemed to me like a creation from a Roald Dahl book. The Bulb-Friendly Giant. He was to bulbs what Willy Wonka is to chocolate. He had written books on the subject including Buried Treasures and one titled simply Crocuses. He told me his favourite bulb at the moment was a crocus with blue outer petals that is yellow inside. His wife, who has become an gardening expert in her own right, went her own way cultivating perennials.
“She told me: ‘I do not want to be a slave to your nursery’,” he said.
We whispered through the night, rushing past dark fields where unseen things grew. I said that his house must be filled every day with the scent of fresh cut flowers. He cocked his head and said, “I am never killing the flower, never in my life”, as though cutting flowers for display were the most heinous crime he could imagine.
I wondered was he an advocate of the Prince Charles’ plant-talking method. He said he didn’t need words to communicate with them. He goes into his greenhouses and he intuits which plants need watering or other attention. He doesn’t talk, he feels. He said he had the same intuitive approach to his bees. He never wears protective gear around them. “It you are peaceful while they are working, they are not attacking you,” he said.
Perhaps it was the late hour, or the whispered broken English, but it all sounded deeply spiritual so I asked him about God. “I think, if God exists, he is indifferent to all that is going on,” he said.
We would have continued on this slant but suddenly the driver stopped the bus. He turned around to address us. It was late, he said crossly, he was concentrating on driving and people were sleeping. We should stop talking and have some consideration for the other passengers. I looked around, to apologise, but it didn’t appear as though anyone else had noticed our whispered conversation. The driver started the bus and Janis went back to his own seat. We both dozed for the rest of the journey in that uncomfortable late-night coach kind of way. When we got to the airport we shook hands. In my sort-of garden, bulbs poke out of the earth. I wait to see what will happen and I think about the nurseryman.
In other news . . .
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