Puddock Hill Journal #20: On a recent visit to the Baltics, I spotted our native plants away from home, not always behaving.
You didn’t hear from me last week because Pam and I went off on a two-week Baltic cruise with her mother and some friends. The prior week’s newsletter, in case you’re wondering, was teed up before I left.
If you’re a gardener, you know how hard it can be to leave home in summer. We pictured weeds overtaking the raised beds during our absence (they turned out not to be too bad) and worried about how much rain would fall (enough to maintain the status quo, as it turned out).
As for what lay before us, we didn’t go abroad to look at gardens or nature per se, so I didn’t focus on the green things at first. Our itinerary went from Copenhagen to Riga to Talinn to Helsinki to Stockholm to Visby, Sweden (a charming old city on the island of Gotland), to Klaipeda, Lithuania, to Gdynia, Poland (near Gdansk) to Helsingborg, Sweden, and finally to Bruges in Belgium. I won’t bore you with the tourist pics, but suffice to say it was primarily a cultural trip. As such, we tasted some interesting food (and some very good food), stopped in a few museums, walked many cobblestoned streets, gawked at old buildings, and paused to contemplate the often grim history around us.
In the past thousand years, as you may know, Baltic people rarely had the opportunity for self government, and in more modern history this fact was most attributable to the territorial designs of Germans and Russians. As the Russian wounds are fresher and, given the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, impossible to put fully in the rearview mirror, our local guides did not hold back their disgust with their Russian neighbors. The general attitude evoked what William Faulkner said about the American South: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”