LIght Needs
Roxani Krystalli
Photos: Roxani Krystalli
Έλα λίγο να δεις τα λουλουδάκια μου!
My mother was not prone to requests. She had other ways of conveying her authority and desires—a well-timed sigh, an exasperated cigarette. The garden, though, elicited from her a kind of whimsy. “Come here a bit,” she’d start with a surfeit of charm, “and look at my little flowers!”
Now that I garden too, I know that the invitation to look at someone’s flowers is rarely as interesting to others as it is to the person who grew them. As a child, I never quite knew what my mother was asking me to look at, even though beauty was often at the end of her outstretched finger. I thought, foolishly, that I was seeing the plants every day while walking past them or playing beside them. My mother, however, didn’t want me to walk past or play beside; she wanted me to be in the company of, to marvel at the life that thrived in her care.
Geraniums were a source of great pride by the end of her life. Like everything else my mother claimed was easy, growing geraniums was not. They demanded attention and inspired a choreography of care. They were arranged in terracotta pots around the balcony, which my mother regularly moved so she could wash the clay marks off the white tiles. When I suggested she could get plastic pots instead, she declared that plastic “did not agree with her aesthetic.”
The geraniums required watering and feeding, pruning and pinching, tending of the leaves, prevention of rust spores, or, failing that, treatment of rust. When a neighbour complained that her geraniums were not as good as my mother’s, my mother would both swell with pride and fight the compliment. “What are you talking about,” she’d say, wagging her finger. “Your geraniums are perfect. Perfect! But remember,” she would add, her cigarette-holding hand now soaring to the skies, “remember! You have to aerate the soil.”
When I try to conjure an image of my mother, I see a woman in a long white nightgown sitting on a canvas chair on the balcony, a half-drunk Nescafe by her side, a cigarette in one hand and a geranium leaf in the other.
I don’t know why my mother gardened. I grew up in Thessaloniki in the 1980s, at a time and place in which people practised their hobbies instead of narrating them. By day, my mother worked as a phone operator, manually connecting calls at the switchboard of the national telecommunications agency. She read and she gardened, but wouldn’t have described herself as a reader or a gardener. Interests, preoccupations, and desires anchored the days without defining the self.
That didn’t stop my relatives from developing theories about why others spent time in the way they did. “Retirement,” “the mine,” and “ΔΕΗ” were all offered as explanations for my father’s gardening. ΔΕΗ was Greece’s largest electric power company, and up until the mid-1990s, my father worked at a lignite mine owned by ΔΕΗ. Lignite is a type of brown coal that was then a pillar of Greece’s electricity production. The mine as a place defined my father more than the coal as a material. “The mine” was the answer to where he was, why he was upset or animated, why there were black marks on the balcony that required another round of scrubbing.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both the telecommunications agency and the electricity company were state-owned. In this sense, like most Greeks at the time, my parents worked for the state, albeit for its underpaid fringes. They thought in terms of jobs and work, but rarely in terms of a career or its associated ambitions. They were the mythical public servants who made up the vast Greek state, though the exact meaning of public remained opaque.
Neither of my parents had expressed affection for “the state.” My mother, in particular, was known to throw the occasional egg at riot police during a protest. The only times I heard her invoke her public service were the (frequent) occasions she was pulled over for a driving offence. “Twenty-seven uninterrupted years of public service in my record,” she’d tell the police officer, who was left to figure out the connection between my mother’s public service and her erratic driving. Then again, in all the years I was her frightened passenger, I never once saw her pay a fine. In the end, my parents summed up their affiliation with state public service agencies in the material way that seemed to matter most: having discounts on both the electricity and the phone bill.
Despite, or perhaps because of, my parents’ lack of affinity for it, the state loomed large in the life of our household. Changes of government were followed by whispers. I didn’t know then—and still do not fully understand now—what a new prime minister had to do with who worked at the lignite mine or which phone operator connected calls. These were the kinds of conversations I was shielded from, despite having developed an uncanny ability to sit very still with my ears perked until I became virtually invisible to adults. The words "pensions” and “syndicalism” were thrown around, along with the surnames of the two political dynasties that took turns governing Greece at the time. Before I could figure out how the pieces connected, someone would whisper, a bit more urgently than usual, “the child can hear us,” and the conversation would die.
By the mid-1990s, both my parents would retire. With time, the silences around the circumstances of my parents’ retirements calcified, as did the resentments. In lieu of whispering, my father dug. On weekends, he would take me to a plant nursery, where he purchased gardening books and tools. The language for tools still comes to me primarily in Greek, even though the rest of my life unfolds in English. I dream, fall in love, and grieve in English now, but a spade is still a τσάπα, a sledgehammer a βαριοπούλα.
In proximity to the soil, my own linguistic roots lie bare. No vocabulary can supplant my mother tongue. Standing in our garden in Scotland, I ask Malachy if he’d like “a tool with which to dig.” He acknowledges my request with confusion and worry, as though I’ve had a stroke. I reach for language and only find Greek. Much of my life in our Scottish garden unfolds in hastily googled online dictionaries, in the space between mother tongues and adopted homes.
The garden of my childhood home in Thessaloniki started out as a construction site. My parents bought the land from a friend and built the house slowly, paycheck by paycheck, over the course of seven years, five months, and three days. It is through collective repetition that family mythologies form, mutate, and lodge in the brain. The time period of house-building varied slightly depending on who in the family told the story, and it varies still in my own retelling. When, after my parents’ deaths, I had to unearth the house deed, I was surprised that the story recorded in the document differed only slightly from the one my relatives improvised each time.
Seven years, five months, and three days of house-building were disastrous for the soil. In all the years we lived in that house, we routinely pulled half a drainpipe out of a flower bed or found rusty nails among the seedlings. In the year immediately after his retirement, my father was sustained by finding ways to improve the soil. From what I could tell, that project involved vigorous digging, adding horse manure, some mumbling mixed with the occasional swear word, and intermittent sighs audible from the living room. My mother would watch from the window, harmonise her own sighs, and sometimes say “See? The mine,” as though that explained everything. When the persistent digging and sighing became too much for her, she’d declare that it was time for me to take a glass of water out to my father. I was also to tell him that under no circumstances was he to step onto the balcony in his muddy boots. Mum had just washed the tiles.
My parents gardened competitively with each other. While my mother mostly grew flowers and my father vegetables, they each dabbled in the other’s domain. When my father developed glaucoma and eventually lost his sight, he could no longer sow seeds, so the annual planting fell to my mother. She opened a pack of onion seeds a little too vigorously, and the seeds fell out, all landing pretty much in the exact same spot. “Well, we are off to a good start,” my father said when she told him how the morning’s planting had gone. “Best go to the supermarket and buy some onions!” For weeks, my mother went to the onion patch and spoke to the struggling, overcrowded seedlings. “Μεγαλώστε, κρεμμυδάκια μου, να δει ο Χρήστος!” Grow, my little onions, so I can show my husband! Some plants benefit from light; others, in my mother’s imagination, grew simply out of spite.
In my childhood gardening memories, I was more observer than participant. I watched my father pick aphids off the roses with a paintbrush dipped in soapy water. I heard my mother grunt as she moved pots. My cousin and I played ball, as we called it, on hot summer afternoons, careful not to rouse the neighbours from their siesta, not be in the sun for too long, and—worst of all—not to knock over my mother’s pots and destroy the geraniums. I read novels on the balcony during the pruning of the linden tree, silently crying because I wasn’t ready to let go of its limbs, leading my mother to conclude that The Child is too sensitive for life itself.
With the garden at the centre, I floated happily in the orbit of care channelled elsewhere. My parents’ was not a companionable gardening. They didn’t see it as their moment to parent or to teach, nor as their way of being with each other or with me. Watching my parents garden is how I learned solitude.
In the summer of 2022, a year and a half after my mother died, I went to Berlin for the first time. The trip was punctuated by geraniums. They were in nearly every window box, every balcony, every hanging basket—the exact same ones I remembered from my childhood in Thessaloniki: bright red flowers, standing upright like an exclamation, strongly scented, soft, sculpted leaves. I had lived away from Greece for over fifteen years at that point, and none of the other places I had called home seemed hospitable to these Mediterranean plants. It is entirely possible, of course, that geraniums grew in Boston or Bogotá and I had looked past them, just as I had failed to really see my mother’s geraniums decades earlier. My mother’s geraniums belong to an era of my life; they mark time itself. Tethered to a moment in time and rooted in place, it became impossible to picture geraniums thriving anywhere other than on a balcony in Greece.
And here they were in Berlin. In fact, they were everywhere. In the glasshouses of the ornamental garden near our home in Scotland. In hanging baskets outside London pubs. On the front page of the seed catalogue that makes every January more survivable in northern latitudes.
That day in Berlin, I knew that the time had come to grow geraniums of my own.
The garden of our first home in Scotland was shared among four flats, though Malachy and I were the only ones interested in spending time in it. The space consisted of a mossy lawn, a small slab of concrete that used to host a mini playpark for the previous homeowners’ children, and a bed overgrown with stinging nettles and yellow loosestrife. Loosestrife allows for little else to grow among it. After our neighbour told us that her late husband had planted it two decades earlier, I couldn’t bear to uproot it.
It was hardly a hospitable environment for a gardener, but that didn’t stop me from trying. I sowed sweet pea seeds in trays on the kitchen windowsill and moved them to the only garden bed before the loosestrife took over. When a late May frost threatened the seedlings, I dug through the plastics recycling bin to rescue our discarded Greek yoghurt containers and shrouded the still-fragile sweet peas in them. The plants survived the frost, smelling vaguely of my homeland’s dairy for the rest of that week.
Garden sweet peas
The bigger problem with that garden, according to the internet experts, was the light. The garden faced northeast, and the cement slab that hosted a few pots stood in the shadow of a neighbour’s shed, meaning that no part of the growing surface received sufficient light for plants to grow and thrive. “This is a challenging aspect,” gardening websites stated in language I was still learning to decode. Some went as far as to declare that this was “the wrong light.”
In my Greek eyes, there could be no such thing as the wrong light. “People do not look at the sky enough,” my father would tell me on our walks around Thessaloniki. I was in primary school and he was in search of a chance to smoke a cigarette in peace. Though both he and my mother smoked vociferously, they also policed each other’s cigarettes, leading to a daily game of counting and denial. “I’ve only had two today,” my mother lied with authority, “one with each of my coffees.” “You’re on your second pack already,” she’d say to my father, while blowing out a ring of smoke. On our walks, my father smoked slowly, sometimes forgetting to shake off the ash. As we walked, he’d teach me the names of clouds and gently introduced me to an improvised typology of light: sweet light, milky light, sharp light, ominous light.
Glaucoma made the outlines of my father’s vision blurrier over time, rendering the details inaccessible. He still knew, however, perhaps by intuition, a day of good light. Losing one’s sight is an odd phrase, as though it is possible to misplace one’s ability to see, like a set of keys. I far prefer the Greek expression, first uttered to us by the ophthalmologist my father went to when it was too late for any meaningful intervention. “He is losing his light,” the doctor said to my mother and me. The possessive form still strikes me. My father was not losing light in general, or the light, definitively. He was losing his light. In the possessive, I, too, was vicariously losing a way of seeing.
As my father’s sight deteriorated and he became housebound, I took it upon myself to be his correspondent of light. I reported on the nuances of October mornings, yielding some of my favourite light of the year, and the heartbreak of July afternoons, with blooming sunsets contaminated by wildfire smoke. Wrong light, however, never entered our register.
The spring after my mother died, I decided to grow dahlias in the garden of the wrong light. “Aspect: full sun,” every plant catalogue stated, and the gardening experts agreed. Dahlias may have needed at least four to six hours of direct sunlight, which our first garden in Scotland couldn’t deliver, but they’d have to do with less. (After all, I did with less, I reasoned unreasonably). Powered by a vague desire, I decided to ignore the websites and guidance. These were not grief flowers, nor was this nostalgic gardening. Though my father grew dahlias in Greece, they were not plants I associated with him—nor were his dahlias as spectacular as those my classmate Kostas’ parents grew. Kostas would come to school every September with buckets of dahlias for our teacher, the heads of flowers leaning dramatically over the rim, like teenagers rolling their eyes at the dinner table. My dahlias in Scotland had nothing to do with Kostas or with my father, with grief or with Thessaloniki. In the chain of memory, dahlias formed a new foundation, pointing not towards the past but the future. Along with the yoghurt-shielded sweet peas, they’d become the first flowers I grew as an adult at a place I could call home.
Dahlias grow from tubers, lumps that store the plant’s nutrients. On the day they arrived, the dahlia tubers looked suspiciously like dehydrated testicles. I overprepared for their arrival, as though I could compensate for the not-quite-right habitat— “the wrong light”—with enough information.
In her cooking and gardening alike, my mother was intuitive. When I returned to Thessaloniki to empty the house after her death, I found my maternal grandmother’s recipe book. “Keep adding flour until it needs no more,” she had written, an instruction intelligible only to those who shared her intuition. Intuition can be modelled and nurtured, but perhaps not inherited. I yearned for my grandmother to tell me exactly how much flour I should measure, knowing full well that the baking scales in my kitchen would be as alien to her as her intuitive instructions were to me.
Like her mother, my mother just knew. She knew when a flower needed water, when a cutting had rooted, when a houseplant could do with a new pot. This was the kind of knowledge born of years of accumulated attention and from rootedness in place, from studying the soil and the light through everyday encounter. It was also the knowledge born of solitude, of being able to channel care without having to put it into language for the benefit of others.
My own gardening intuition in Scotland started out wobbly, so I followed instructions with a faithfulness I know would make my mother laugh. I could picture her saying that I did not need to read every page of the “how to plant your dahlias” manual that came with the box of tubers, nor did I need to measure compost and perlite quite so carefully (especially given that, days earlier, I had no idea what perlite was). I could “just” throw a little soil on the tubers, sprinkle some water, and be done with it. Alas, in the absence of intuition, I chose the path of caution and angst.
I potted the tubers and, given that we didn’t have a greenhouse or sheltered space in which they could live until leaves emerged, the pots took up a considerable portion of the kitchen windowsill previously occupied by the sweet peas. “Would you like us to move out,” Malachy joked one morning, “so the dahlias have more space to flourish?” His tone suggested he was half-afraid I might take him up on it.
Like the rest of that garden, the kitchen window also faced in the allegedly wrong direction when it came to the dahlias’ light needs, so once the tubers sprouted, I moved half of the fledgling plants to the narrow windowsill in the communal stairwell, where the green shoots could enjoy a few hours of plentiful sunlight. Every few days, I moved the plants from the stairwell to the kitchen and vice versa, out of some sense that abundant light should be distributed fairly. I knew that this was above and beyond the call of duty, whatever the duty was, and Malachy knew to leave me to it. For weeks, I shuffled between the kitchen and the stairwell, mopping up drips from the holes at the bottom of pots, staking growing plants, and watching them catch the light. I became invested in the ritual of waiting, of caring for budding life even when the promise of beauty or blossom still felt distant.
In early May, with the dahlias nearly reaching my height and outgrowing their original pots, I lurked in gardening forums where people discussed when the last day of frost might be. It is best, the internet gardeners said, to wait to plant dahlias until after the frosts have passed. People occasionally shared horror stories about that one year when so-and-so had optimistically planted their such-and-such plant only for it to be destroyed by late May or early June frosts. The last of the frosts is not a date fixed on the calendar; on the contrary, especially in Scotland, it is a moveable milestone, one marked and celebrated by an absence. For how many days must the frost stay away for people to believe—to trust—that it will not imminently return? What I lack in gardening intuition, I make up for in hope. I am prone to scattering seed liberally with the faith that some of it will grow, trusting that the stake will support a stem, the frost will stay away, the tuber will sprout, the soil will hold.
There were no flower beds to plant the dahlias outside, so while I waited for the risk of frosts to pass, I picked out pots. I may not have my mother’s intuition, but I did inherit her aesthetic. Terracotta pots assembled on the cement patio outside, in the shadow of our neighbour’s shed. On a late May morning, young dahlias took their places in them. During the first weeks of their outdoor life, I shuttled the dahlias back and forth between the indoor stairwell and the patio to shield them from the evening temperature drop (and from the slugs and snails that liked to munch on them). As the gardening jargon would have it, this is part of the process of “hardening off” plants, though I willed for them to hold on to their tenderness.
Dahlias on the patio
I was away from home a lot that June, travelling for work, agonising all the while over whether the tender plants would survive the absence of my attention. What they did was bloom. When I became the dahlias’ primary custodian, I realised that being raised in the proximity of a garden, or being a descendant of people who gardened, does not make a gardener. A gardener is made in the waiting, in the insistent staring at the soil in the absence of any obvious activity. I became a gardener in the time it took for a plant to grow a pair of leaves and then another, aptly called “true leaves,” certifying life. A gardener comes into being over a chain of mornings, rushing out to the patio, dew gathering on pyjama bottoms, to see what may have grown overnight, lifting each pot to check the bottom for slugs, like a new parent sniffing a diaper. I was out in the garden at first and last light, with swifts screaming overhead, torch in hand, like a horticultural Nancy Drew, ready to throw a slug over the fence towards the river. I became a gardener when I felt accountable for the chain of care and for the acts of cruelty entangled with it, deciding what gets uprooted or flung over the fence and what gets a chance at flourishing.
Years later, another garden in another home in a different part of Scotland. Closer to the coast, fewer days of rain—and, still, that same “wrong light.” “Let’s hope we can have a south-facing garden before we retire,” Malachy said as we stood on the shady patio of our new home, then populated more by echo than by memory. We moved in on a Friday in October, when the light was rapidly shrinking and most of the seasonal growth was dying back. We would have to wait through the winter to find out what might poke through the soil. We would get to know the trees slowly over time, through buds and leaves.
On the third day in the new house, overwhelmed by the symphony of IKEA Allen keys, I stepped out into the garden. The previous owners had left behind their greenhouse. A greenhouse had become newly aspirational for me, a desire that took shape mostly through watching British TV gardening programmes in which men with fluffy dogs stood in their “potting shed” and sowed pumpkin seeds meditatively into trays, all while gesturing vividly about the right mix of compost.
Greenhouses were an anathema to most Greeks, who used the expression “greenhouse tomatoes” to refer to unfortunate vegetables raised under cover, as opposed to those basking in the noble sunlight while enjoying the soundtrack of the cicadas. “We live on the nicest parcel of land in all of Europe,” my parents would say, referring to what the alchemy of soil and light brought to life in Greece. On the parcel of land on which I now stand in Scotland, a greenhouse enables dreams that might not otherwise take hold. It enables life.
On that third day in the new house, before we had even a single chair to sit on, I planted three hundred bulbs in the garden. There are always reasons not to plant. For leisurely gardeners like me, planting can often feel less urgent than whatever else demands attention. Yet, the garden pulls me through time. It requires tending not only to the soil, but also to the desires of my future self who might like to sit among blowsy daffodils months after the last box has been unpacked. The garden sows and invites desires. It is an enterprise that thrives on dreaming, backed by care.
With three hundred bulbs in the ground, for the rest of that first autumn and winter, I treated the greenhouse with hesitation, lacking both the desire and the knowledge to fill it. I had stepped into a life that I did not yet know how to inhabit. For now, I was content to walk in it, marvelling at the cyclamen I recognised, picking strangers’ cigarette butts off the soil, watching the robins feed on worms, trying to imagine what an abundance of life might look like.
This was a home in which no new bad things had yet happened. All our losses, our illnesses, our aches, our griefs had taken seed elsewhere, even if they still travelled with us. Their cumulative weight had made me reluctant to wait—for retirement, for better light, for full fluency in the vocabulary of garden care. Around Christmas, as the botanical catalogues were still full of twinkly lights and last calls for tulip bulbs, I ordered geraniums.
The geraniums arrived in the post months later, before the last frosts, looking sorry for themselves. I plopped them into the greenhouse, readying the terracotta pots that had held the dahlias in our previous home. The young plants appeared somewhat anaemic, feebler than I had imagined. My mother’s geraniums had only wedged in my memory as fully thriving flowers. Her care for them happened in the background, in moments that had slipped my notice.
Greenhouse geraniums
Early May in the new house, with the first spot of sun warming the soil. For a few days, the windows in the greenhouse appeared to open at will. Neither Malachy nor I recalled touching them. I was content to believe we had a friendly greenhouse ghost. It turned out that the windows are automatic. There is a wax mechanism, and when the wax warms up, a piston pushes the windows open. When the temperature drops, the wax cools, and the windows slide magically shut.
I like my version better. Maybe it was my mother, haunting the geraniums, checking that I had adequately aerated the soil.
