Johanna’s Story

My name is Johanna. I am 71 years old and I have lived in the same village in Lower Saxony my whole life. I have a small garden that I have been tending for forty years. Fruit trees, vegetables, herbs. It has always felt like the most honest thing I do. Two years ago, in late February, my plum tree was already full of blossoms. I remember standing under it thinking: this is beautiful, but it is wrong. It was far too early. Three weeks later, there was a hard frost overnight. By morning, every single blossom had turned brown and died. I walked through the garden in silence. There would be no plums that summer. It sounds like a small thing. It didn't feel small. I kept thinking about my granddaughter, who was six at the time. She loves plumcake. I found myself wondering, how many more of these seasons am I going to watch go wrong? How many things will she simply never know? I won't pretend I found an answer to those questions. But I did start doing things differently. I began collecting rainwater in big barrels. I replanted parts of the garden with older, more heat-resistant varieties. I started talking to my neighbours about it, Not to alarm them, just to say: have you noticed this too? It turns out, most of them had. That surprised me. We were all carrying it quietly. I still make plum cake when I can. But now I make it differently, with a little more awareness of what it took to get there.