The Garden, Part 3: The Garden That Shaped Us.

The Quiet Thread

Issue No.16 – The Garden, Part Three: The Garden That Shaped Us.

Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

Written by ARNE & CARLOS

This is the final part of our garden trilogy. If you missed the first two, you can read Part One here and Part Two here.

My first memory of a garden must be from the summer I turned six. I rode the milk truck alone down to the village with a shopping list from my grandmother. The milk truck was a blue lorry with room for about seven passengers — one row of seats in front, one behind — and a flatbed for milk churns, mail, and whatever else needed bringing up to the mountain farms. Most of the passengers were tourists heading off to hike in the mountains, or to fish and camp. The driver was a decent man, and my grandmother was not afraid to send me down with him.

He dropped me at the shop near home, and I handed the list to one of the women working there — probably Liv, if she was on shift, my father’s cousin. Then I remember walking home to wait for the milk truck to make its way back up the mountain. That would take a few hours.

And the sight that met me at the bend just before our farm was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. The tall trees were full of leaves — I had never seen them like that before — and then came the garden belonging to our two neighbours, sisters, one unmarried, one a widow. It was like the Garden of Eden I had heard about, though this was many years before I knew what an English cottage garden even was.

I had never seen such tall flowers before. At home, my mother had a garden with flowers along the wall of the house, but nothing like this. I remember my great-grandmother’s kitchen garden from when I was very small, and the apple tree that had grown from a seed sent to my great-great-grandmother in a letter — from America, possibly from her brother Tobias, in Wisconsin. In my grandmother’s childhood the apples had been large and good, so large that they split open when they fell to the ground. By the time we were children, the apples had gone small and sour. But the tree itself was like something out of a Pippi Longstocking film, with hollow spaces where you could hide things.

I started school the following year and grew more used to the flowers in the neighbours’ garden, and to the two sisters in their straw hats, moving between the beds on sunny afternoons as I walked home from school. At home, the apple tree was eventually cut down, after half of it had already fallen and the treasures hidden inside were found. My mother kept a small kitchen garden of her own for a few years too, until her job put a stop to it, and she made a small, easier stone bed instead. New apple trees came in. The berry bushes stayed. That old patch became my own testing ground for years, long before I had any language for why.

One thing is certain: meeting the Eden of my childhood, where two old sisters were Adam and Eve, was the beginning of my interest in gardens — an interest that later led me to a year at agricultural school. Nothing more happened with it until much later, when the two of us moved into the station where we live now, and built a garden of our own. Carlos remembers another story.

My grandfather grew roses in southern Sweden and would cut a few and bring them in for my mother every time we visited. I remember the perfume more than anything, and the colour — yellow, pink, red, impossibly strong.

My father had the same instinct, wherever we happened to be living. We moved often, and in Brazil that meant a hedge of poinsettias — enormous, entirely red, and completely unremarkable there, since nobody in Brazil had told the poinsettia it was meant to be a fragile Christmas decoration rather than a hedge.

It was only after we moved to Sweden that I understood something had gone strange — potted poinsettias, sold in shops before Christmas, bought and dead within the week.

We still buy them every year. They still die.

Eventually we settled in a small coastal town in southern Sweden, on a peninsula looking out at Denmark, with some of the best weather the country has. My parents bought a little house with a little garden, and my father would potter in it on weekends. As a teenager I was put to work — weeding, raking, clearing beds — mostly, I suspect, to teach me responsibility.

I did not particularly enjoy any of it. I did it for the pocket money.

It was as a teenager, on a family trip to Sofiero Palace — about an hour north of where we lived — that I understood what all of it had quietly been building toward. Sofiero had been the summer home of Margaret of Connaught, a British princess and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who married into the Swedish royal family and brought her own country’s garden tradition with her when she came.

It was the kitchen gardens that undid me completely — walled, orderly, and at their heart a glasshouse built for grapevines. I remember thinking it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

And there we were, years later, standing on a grey platform in Valdres.

I was thinking of Sofiero, quietly disappointed that this was not it. Arne, I suspect, was thinking of two sisters in straw hats, and a garden that had looked, to a six-year-old, like Eden itself.

Neither of us said as much at the time. But we were both measuring the same grey platform against a garden that existed nowhere but in memory — and thinking, at exactly the same moment, the same thought: this is not what either of us pictured. How do we make it work anyway?

Twenty-Seven Years Later

We were having breakfast in the garden this summer, surrounded by peonies and delphiniums and roses all blooming at once, and the bees were everywhere — so many of them, so constant, that they sounded like they had always been there.

They had not.

There were no bees here once, because there were no flowers for them to come for. There were no birds either. Something felt off when we first moved in, though neither of us could say exactly what.

We heard the story eventually — the previous station master had shot every bird that came near the place — and understood.

There were no birds. That was it.

We only won them back by feeding them, generously, probably too generously — seed, but also fat: coconut oil, scraps of ham fat from Christmas, whatever we had. More than one bullfinch grew round enough on it that we would watch him wobble to the feeder over morning coffee like a small barrel.

“I think we should take it down a notch, Arne,” I said one morning, watching a particularly heroic effort to reach the seed covered in coconut fat.

We built houses for them too, whole clusters, hoping enough of them would stay. Some did. Enough, now, that every year we watch a family move in, and every year, eventually, we watch them leave the nest — which still catches us both, every single time, probably because of how hard we once had to work just to get anyone to come at all.

Alexandra

We met her during those early years of building the garden, while we were in Paris for work — a woman with a small, secret garden, walled in high enough to feel hidden, extraordinary for the middle of a capital city.

The garden consisted mostly of gravel and pots; Arne resisted grass for years afterwards for no better reason than that hers had none. Every time we visited, we would find her in it, often just back from riding, and more than once she would show us the latest arrivals — whatever she had recently acquired, or whatever happened to be blooming — before she showed us anything else.

Like the olive tree that had clearly arrived only the day before.

“This is my new friend,” she said, meaning it completely.

It did not strike either of us as strange. We had been introducing delphiniums to houseguests the same way for years.

Her own gardener, a genius with plants where Alexandra was not, would appear from nowhere every time she reached for a flower, slap her hand gently away, and scold her in French. I understood every word. Arne, who speaks none of the language, understood just as well.

She and her garden left one of the deepest impressions either of us has ever had. They inspired an entire winter collection we designed and called Ladies in the Greenhouse. We gave her a wool coat from that collection afterwards, embroidered with flowers, for something she never knew she’d given us.

A Book Called Garden People

We had already met Alexandra by then, and something about her — the olive tree, the delphiniums, the whole secret garden of it — had told us she was one of us, in a way we did not yet have words for.

Not long after, we came across a book called Garden People, with Valerie Finnis’s photographs of English gardeners caught over the course of the twentieth century.

We returned to it obsessively, long before we ever set foot in England ourselves, looking at the same photographs over and over. We did not think of it as research. We simply loved looking at it.

It was the people, more than the gardens themselves, who held our attention.

There were, it turned out, many of us.

We had that same feeling on our first garden trip to England, years later, boarding a train because an Icelandic volcano had refused to let us fly: that we might meet a few more.

The National Trust’s Secret Weapon

Our very first stop was Sissinghurst, the most famous garden in England, and we arrived with the kind of anticipation that had taken ten years to build.

At the ticket office there was a woman sitting on a round table slightly apart from the counter, knitting, watching the queue the way a Miss Marple might — taking everything in before saying a word.

She set her knitting down as we approached, looked up, and said, “Hello, gentlemen. And where are you from?” — and invited us to sit with her.

We knew, before she had said another word, that whatever she was selling, we were going to buy.

We talked about her knitting first — baby blankets, for charity. Only once that conversation had run its course did she get to the actual business: might we be interested in a membership?

The cost worked out to roughly three entrance fees for the two of us, and after three properties, everything else was free for a year.

Look at the map, she said. Look at everywhere you could go!

We joined on the spot, and spent the rest of that trip driving around England with a National Trust badge proudly displayed on the windscreen of a rental car, discovering places neither of us had known existed until we saw them on her map.

We have kept the membership for years since, and we still greet every volunteer we meet with real enthusiasm — most of them still knitting, still answering questions, still having a jolly good conversation with whoever sits down next to them.

There is something about being Norwegian in an English garden that reliably leads the conversation to one of two places: the Vikings, or the war.

A Fiftieth Birthday, and a Room Full of Manure

For Arne’s fiftieth, I asked him what he would like to do — thinking, honestly, of something modest, a day in Lillehammer or Oslo.

He said Calke Abbey.

I had to look it up.

I booked a hotel in Gloucestershire, Lords of the Manor, which at the time had a very well-known restaurant. It was his fiftieth birthday, and I was not about to leave dinner to chance, so I wrote ahead to book a table.

We were told the restaurant was closed that evening for a private event.

What kind of event, I asked.

A talk by the garden writer and designer Bunny Guinness, for the locals.

Might we be allowed to join?

Yes — booked.

I may have misjudged the distances, because Calke Abbey, it turned out, was the better part of five hours away and back. We arrived at the hotel with barely enough time to change, sat down among a room of well-dressed strangers, mostly in tweed, and listened to Bunny give a genuinely captivating lecture.

Afterwards, we had a lovely conversation with her too. It turned out she had worked as an au pair in Norway in her youth, and still had fond memories of our country.

The rest of dinner turned to manure.

One woman set her handbag down on the table with real ceremony and announced, in a beautiful, posh accent, that she had a great deal to say on the subject.

She was not wrong.

It remains, we think, the finest fiftieth birthday either of us could have arranged, and neither of us planned a single hour of it.

Pyjama Gardeners

For twenty-seven years, we have run outside first thing, still in pyjamas. We never thought much about it; gardening that way simply felt natural. At some point, a photograph of one of us, or both, doing exactly that ended up on social media. One of our Instagram followers left a comment:

“Gardening in your pyjamas? There are many of us.”

Nowadays we really don’t mind being photographed in our pyjamas.

It helps that we own rather nice ones.

In 1999, Arne came home from a weekend away and told me, somewhere between the skiing and the knitting, that he had bought a train station. There was a grey platform, a lake beside it, and nothing else — no flowers, no birds, no bees, not the faintest idea of what any of this would become.

Twenty-seven years on, we no longer know where the garden ends and the rest of us begins.

It gave us birds, and we gave it houses. It gave us bees, and we gave it flowers to come for. It gave us Alexandra, and a book, and a volunteer with a map, and a woman with strong opinions about manure, and it has asked for nothing back except the one thing we still give it, every morning, before we are even properly dressed: our attention.

We did not set out to become this. We set out to start a design business.

We built a home instead, and the garden built us — designers still, artists still, but pyjama gardeners now too.

The platform is still there, somewhere, underneath all of it.

We have simply stopped being able to see it.

From our railway station in Norway, where the bees are, this week, too many to count.

ARNE & CARLOS