My Mother's Garden

This project tells the story of a garden that no longer exists – a fleeting dream, a borderland between light and darkness, between memory and forgetting.

My Mother’s Garden

My mother Gertrud was two years old when her father Willy went off to war, and bitter years began for her family. They were struggling, poorly clothed, cold, and often hungry. Due to the bombing raids by the Allies on Hamburg, they had to rush to an air raid shelter many nights, and her father had been missing since 1945.

Yet my mother experienced her childhood as a “carefree, happy time”; small everyday occurrences could evoke “the highest feelings of happiness” in her, in her own words. Her childhood home stood in the midst of a garden surrounded by ditches and hedges, a small enclosed realm of its own. She wrote: “Every day I discovered something new, something wonderful, and it all belonged to me: the red poppies that sometimes grew between the beds, the stones along the path, the black-spotted ladybird, and the sparkling snail shell beneath the currant leaf. That was my little world; here I felt safe from all that was hostile, from whatever might threaten from the outside world; it must not cross our boundary!”

Gertrud loved all kinds of fairy tales and collected fairy tale pictures from oatmeal packets, featuring dwarfs, misty forests, and castles. They were dark, legendary, and unreal; she created magical stories to go with them, and in the end, the pictures filled an entire album. Her garden also had animals: white rabbits, chickens, and a dog named Axel. There was a sandpit, a swing, a little hut, and an apple tree. She played there daily with her siblings and the children from the neighbourhood.

So she had this wonderful garden, her kingdom, where she felt completely safe, which also became a realm of fairy tales and fantasy for her. She developed a basic trust in this world, was brave, and never fearful.

My mother loved plants above all and wanted to become a gardener after finishing school in 1955; that was her dream. But her mother talked her out of it, saying it was not a good profession for a young woman, and so she became a druggist instead.

After her marriage to Sigi, they lived for a time in a two-room cooperative flat in the north of Hamburg, until in 1967 they were finally offered a larger ground-floor flat in a new housing estate. A slope of construction debris, covered with some topsoil, became her new garden. My brother and I were still small, and my mother began to create a garden for us from this patch of bare earth, one that resembled the wondrous garden of her childhood. She worked almost every day in this garden, and everything flourished. There was a sandpit, a swing, a little hut, and an apple tree. Later, there were also guinea pigs and rabbits, and a cat called Mulli. We played there every day with our friends and the many neighbourhood children. We invented fairy tales and stories. We dressed up. We had secrets. We felt protected.

Later, my children also played in this garden, which by then had grown wild and private; they experienced their first sledging adventures here and played badminton with their grandmother in the summer.

By 2023, my mother had lost her strength; she was a widow, suffering from dementia, and could no longer care for the garden. She agreed to move in with me to an apartment in a retirement residence, giving up her beloved home. She did so without complaint and found joy in her balcony, with its large plant box. I had hoped she could enjoy her new life for a while longer, but that was not to be. The cancer came as a complete surprise. Six weeks after the diagnosis, she died.

She left me several self-bound books that she had written as a girl and young woman, filled with memories of her magical garden, the paradise of her childhood.

The new photobook we had planned to create together, I ultimately put together alone. Her pictures, her words, and the shadows life cast are woven into it. It tells of a garden, of a dream – and of what remains when everything fades.