this post was originally in multiple

Starving for the Green

This post was originally in "Multiple Realities of Istanbul" but as

there were increasingly more posts relating to gardening and only

marginally to Istanbul itself, I decided to split the gardening posts

off into their own blog. Transferring them all will take a bit of

time.

All you have to do is check out Istanbul on Google Earth to see that

central Istanbul has a lot of cement in it. It's not devoid of

greenery; there are parks and they are working on making more,

planting median strips and highway embankments.

It wasn't always this way. There was a distinct Ottoman garden

culture, and old engravings and photos up until the 1950s show a city

full of wooden houses, many of which had back gardens, small towns

along the Bosphorus backed by lush hillsides and fields. But with a

few precious exceptions, the building boom caused by the massive

migration that began in the 70s and continues unabated has made that

Istanbul a thing of the past. The fields behind Arnavutk�y that

produced their famous fragrant pink strawberries now sprout endless

rows of cement apartment buildings. In most neighborhoods there are

only a very few old houses remaining among the valleys of concrete;

they and the shady courtyards of some of the old mosques are enough to

remind one that this was once a very, very different place. Still, its

a city built on fertile soil in a fairly mild climate, and any area

left free of cement quickly goes green. Pretty much any sidewalk crack

or rock wall has something growing out of it. It's as if it still

longs to be a green place.

Like most foreigners living here, I started out in the Beyoglu area.

It's Istanbul's main "European" face; dominated by the pedestrian

Istiklal Avenue, it is probably the easiest place for a foreigner to

live. English-language bookstores, lots of cafes, easy transportation,

varied shopping and resturants and an "anything goes" atmosphere are

some of the many reasons many newcomers choose to live there, or in

the once ill-famed but now swank neighborhood of Cihangir.

But I didn't grow up in a big city, I grew up in Iowa, at the edge of

town. We always had a yard, my mother was an avid gardener, in 10

minutes I could be in fields or woods, and that's where I spent most

of my free time.

In Seattle, a city with a real gardening culture (probaby because just

about anything will grow there), I was seriously bitten by the

gardening bug. I lived in my last house there for almost nine years

and soon the weed infested lawn in the almost bare back yard was gone.

The picture here shows where I started every morning; my garden was

like another room of my house.

When I came to Istanbul, it was for a specific reason, to study music.

The original plan was to stay six months, but it ended up being six

years and counting. I went back for a summer to wrap up affairs in

Seattle, sell replaceable belongings and put other things into

storage, and, hardest of all, deal with the garden. Having already

farmed out the real treasures out to trusted friends, I held a sale in

August. In a day's time, what was diggable or if any real value was

gone.

But "Slaves to the Goddess Flora" have no emancipation day. Or to put

it another way: once a hortisexual, always a hortisexual. The first

house I lived in had two small balconies. They were completely filled

with pots within a month or so. Then I moved into a place with no

balconies. I went to window boxes, and what was too big to live there

was donated to the back yard of the music school I was attending. (I

quickly encroached upon that garden as well!) The next place had a

balcony again, and space for window boxes and they were all filled in

short order.

But as nice as potted plants are, they are no substitute for direct

contact with the dirt, the smell of soil, of weeds ripped out. On a

small balcony you can look at your plants, but a garden is (ideally,

to me), a place to be in. They are places of constant change. Each

spring, summer, fall, even winter would bring memories of what was

growing during that season back home; the smell of sweet box, or

winter daphne, the excitement of the first poppy opening in May, the

first raspberry off the canes. I would always just put it off with the

logic that finding a house with a garden anywhere where I could