going marimekko

Sometimes I wonder whether I didn’t spend the first half of my life making sure that I wouldn’t turn into my mother, and the second half noticing all the ways that I have.

There is a photo of my mother that is stuck to the inside of my study cupboard door. She is standing on the beach, wearing bathers and a straw hat. Over her bathers, she is wearing an oversized men’s shirt, one of those grandfather ones with a detachable collar. On her white shirt, there are large acrylic coloured spots hand-painted on to it. Twenty-five years ago, this photo fell out of an airletter that Mum sent me when I was living in London. So I never saw her wearing her spotty shirt. The day this photo slid from the envelope, a wintry afternoon in January, my first thought was that Mum was trying to look younger in a trendy shirt. Whereas today, as a mother to kids in their early 20s, I look at this photo and think to myself, ‘Good for you, Mum, for wearing such a bold shirt, and for finding your own style in clothing.

These days, when I hit the beach, I prefer not to draw attention to myself with loud colours. I anyway wear a wetsuit when I surf, itself a form of camouflage. No, my kinship with my mother’s taste shows up in other ways. Mum had four daughters – I was the third – and, growing up, we all voiced opinions on what she wore. Rarely could she put on a new item of clothing without it drawing a comment from one of us. Eventually, she became so sensitive to our comments that she lost confidence in her taste in clothes, something she only regained after her daughters left home. Hence her spotty shirt over bathers.

Lately I’ve noticed that whenever I wear something new or different, one of my kids, both in their early 20s, will make a quip. Other times their eyes will express what they’ve decided not to say aloud. I used to struggle with this. Some days I still do. However, I’ve come to realise that what my kids want most from what I wear is that it doesn’t make me stand out. They want me to blend in, to not draw attention to myself – not to wear a spotty shirt just to please myself.

Marimekko is a Finnish design label that was big, the world over, in the 70s and 80s. And it was a firm favourite of my mother. A quintessential Marimekko design is based on bold flower shapes, which is perhaps what first drew Mum to it. Growing up, I didn’t share her love of these bold designs, with their minimal shapes and bright contrasting colours. I just didn’t get it. I understood that Mum had moved on from stripes, gingham and chintz, but that was as far as my interest in her love of all things Marimekko went.

Until, a few years ago, I found myself gazing through the window of a stylish local design store and fantasising about filling my home with bold Finnish design, of Marimekko daring. This, of course, will never happen. Marimekko – especially since the label was successfully reinvented – is pricey. Besides, my husband doesn’t like it, doesn’t get it. Even so, this doesn’t stop me from entertaining fantasies of how I’d use Marimekko in my home, should I ever get the chance.

The moment I accepted that I’d turned full circle, and had met my mother head on, was when I recognised my infatuation with Marimekko for what it was, a link to childhood. There is something else that highlights the aesthetic DNA that I share with my mother, which is my growing passion for flowers. Living in London, during my 20s and 30s, flowers were a luxury. With just a windowbox in my flat, flowers weren’t part of my daily life. Cut flowers were a treat – wrapped in cellophane and shipped from somewhere else. They were an indulgence for after the groceries were bought. Just seeing a bunch of flowers at a friend’s place was to suggest that someone was having a birthday.

Only in the last few years, now that my kids are less demanding and I have a big garden, has my love of flowers blossomed. When I walk my dog round local streets, I peer into other people’s gardens. I make mental notes of particular plants and notice where they grow best. I may even steal an overhanging bloom to put in a glass in the kitchen, to draw last thing at night. Flowers interest me, they fascinate me. They enrich my daily life. They have a life of their own, inside of me.

My mother was an exceptional gardener, in a way I’ll never be. Even so, you don’t have to be a family genealogist to realise that the seed of my love of flowers, and of Marimekko, was sown in childhood. Mum died a few years ago now. So it’s a bit late for me to thank her for passing on to me her love of flowers and of Marimekko. Then again, perhaps it’s never too late to say thank you.

too many plums

‘Life is a series of problems’, the matronly grandmother says to her grand-daughter, half-way through Downton Abbey. ‘You solve one problem and you move on to the next’. The grand-daughter, who has just finishing telling her grandmother that she had a baby out of wedlock, a big deal early in the 20^th century, smiles wanly. ‘Yes’, continues Maggie Smith, who plays the grandmother in the drama series, ‘it’s our problems that define us. They make life interesting. And then, when we come to the end of all our problems, we die’.

A year ago, almost to the day, I invited a married couple I didn’t know well for dinner. The dinner was a low key, kitchen-table affair, the kind I like best. After we finished eating and the plates were cleared away, there was a moment of quiet. I’m fine with pauses, but this one was odd. It was Anna who broke the silence. ‘Can you smell something?’ she asked. My heart sank as I caught hold of the corner of the high kitchen table and peered beneath. There, across the wide wooden floorboards, was a trail of dog poo that ran the entire length of the kitchen table.

Like a scene from a 70s sit com, the two men got up from the table without uttering a word, picked up their glasses, and moved next door. This left me begging Anna to join them, as I donned rubber gloves, grabbed bin bags and paper towel, and sloshed some eucalyptus oil into a bucket of hot water.

Eventually the plum crisis passed, as most crises do. After dropping their last plums, the fruit trees slept through the winter. Then suddenly it was spring again. The plum trees flowered, thanks to generous rain. Determined not to be outwitted this time, I visited the garden hire shop and hired a hedge trimmer, a feudal looking instrument with a scythe at one end of its long handle. That same night, I set about whacking down as many unripe plums as I could on to the ground sheets I’d put down to catch the fruit that rained down from the branches above.

I was helped by Nic, a Columbian student currently living with us. When I wheeled the compost bin down the garden, and opened the lid wide so that we could pour in the plums straight off the ground sheets, he frowned. ‘Aren’t you going to eat them?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘Um, there are just too many’, I said, lamely. ‘Besides’, I added, feeling defensive, ‘it would take me hours that I haven’t got to sort through them.’ ‘In my country’, said Nic, ‘we make jam and wine with fruit like this’. ‘Yes’, I thought, ‘except that you’re not in your country, and so we don’t know if that’s what you’d do’. As soon as my mean thought was out, I felt cross with myself for having it. For I too, like Nic, had lived on the opposite side of the world in my 20s. I too had found myself in the middle of other people’s lives, other people’s gardens, doubtless making judgments that it wasn’t my place to make. How could I have known, back then, what it might be like to live year after year with a greedy dog who gorged himself sick on fallen fruit and never learned the lesson?

‘Why don’t we fill the wheelbarrow with these plums?’, I said to Nic. ‘Then we can leave it in the street with some plastic bags, so that whoever wants some plums can take them?’ ‘Yes’, said Nic, sounding relieved. ‘That’s a good idea’.

Last Saturday, after Nic went on a long hike and my kids both crewed in a weekend yacht race, there was a storm wild enough to fill another wheelbarrow of cherry plums. That night, the night after Christmas, in a pitch black hour between midnight and dawn, our dog wouldn’t stop barking. Lying in bed, I ran through possible causes. Was Digger replying to the dog visiting neighbours for Christmas, who I could hear barking? But even after the neighbour’s dog stopped, the barking continued. Could Digger’s paw be stuck in the door of his crate, which he usually opened from the inside? Still more barking. Perhaps Digger had escaped his crate and impaled himself on a coat hook? Probably not, I told myself, calling out in a sleepy but stern voice for him to stop barking, and schooling myself to wait for his whimpers to cease.

I knew there would be a mess to clean up when I went downstairs the next morning. There was. All those plums had done horrible things in Digger’s tummy; the greedy lesson that he would, a classic Labrador, never learn.

That morning, my husband suggested putting up a temporary fence between our courtyard and grass, just as we’d done when Digger was a puppy. That way, Digger couldn’t gorge himself when he had nothing better to do but truffle-hunt for fallen fruit. ‘Great idea’, I said, and thanked him, as I reached for my phone to text the handyman.

Our handyman Rob, whom I consider a friend – you can’t live in a big old house without making friends with your handyman – arrived an hour later, just as I was heading out for a walk with Digger. Under one arm, he carried a roll of red plastic netting that he mentioned he’d found at the back of his garage, and not the wire mesh I’d hoped for. My heart sank. I knew, instantly, that this red mesh would cause my husband – who works in a hut at the bottom of the garden and cares about aesthetics above all – to inwardly weep. ‘Perfect’, I said brightly. ‘And thank you so much for coming before you disappear on holiday’.

Rob and I set to work and, an hour later, a temporary fence and makeshift gate had divided the garden in two. ‘It looks like a crime scene’, said my son, when he returned from his stormy boat race, his eyes red with exhaustion.

These last two mornings, I’ve crept downstairs. Instead of letting out Digger straight away, I’ve slipped down the side of our house and tossed any fallen plums I could find into a bucket. I haven’t tried to collect all the plums. Hundreds of them are hidden safely between and beneath strands of ivy. I pick up just the ones that glint in the sun, on my private Easter egg hunt.

The first morning I collected cherry plums, I resented it. I was wearing my pyjamas and slippers, and had just finished cleaning up Digger’s plum poo explosion. As I plucked cherry plums from between the ivy, my fingernails filled with moist soil. Collecting fallen fruit felt like just more task, one more chore that no-one but me in my family recognised the value of doing. ‘Is that really necessary?’ I imagined my husband silently asking, as he passed by with his morning coffee, on his way to his garden office.

The second morning I slipped out to collect plums from amongst the ivy, I was up and dressed. I’d done my morning yoga and didn’t mind picking up the plums that I knew, if left, would cause our hapless dog to make himself sick. For despite the red mesh fence dividing the garden, we still play with Digger on the grass; and, as soon as he tires of chasing the ball, he sidles off, as if magnetized, to snuffle for plums.

This morning I came downstairs, snuck outside and felt almost Zen as I picked up fallen fruit in the morning sun. I wasn’t exactly grateful for the task. But I didn’t struggle against it either. I knew why I was doing it; accepting that, unless there really is a God, there can be no audience for my efforts to keep our plum numbers down. I also felt heartened, knowing that my morning collect wouldn’t go on forever. Before long, summer plums would give way to autumn leaves, and so on over again.  

After eleven years in our big old house, I accept that this is the way of things in large gardens. Picking up cherry plums from the ivy that runs the length of one side of our garden no longer feels like the depressing problem it did just three days ago. Thanks to Nic, our handyman and the scriptwriter of Downton Abbey, too many plums is a problem I feel I’ve moved on from.

Next?