Today I met a friend at a place called Alphems Arboretum, where a mailman around 1903 started to sow seeds of different and rare tree but also perennials since his wife loved flowers. Almost all perennials are gone but the trees still stands. He also loved oddly shaped stones so when he was out bringing letters to the area he also looked at stones with odd shapes. There’s actually tons of info on this on the net but only in Swedish I’m afraid.

He also walked around in all creeks and waters in the area barefooted so he could feel if any stones he walked on had odd shapes. Then in the evening he went out with his wheelbarrow and collected the stones, he never did this during the day so that people wouldn’t see him and call him crazy 🙂 🙂 :-)Even though he only went to school for a short while he later on learned to write in both English and German so he could order seeds from all over the world.

In 1936 Disney employed a Swede as the Art Director and the first film was Snow white and the seven dwarfs. The Dwarves house is actually inspired by the house the mailman house that he slowly built from one kitchen only to a three room cottage. The cottage had its third room after the film was made though but it was the inspiration because  The Swede Gustav Tenngren grew up not far away from that place 🙂

The tall trees was unfortunately impossible to photograph but there grew amongst all the other trees a pink flowered Snowdrop tree, didn’t even know they could have pink flowers 🙂 Just before I drove away tho the arboretum I went don’t to my cool cellar and looked at two pots I had left there because the Pawpaw seedling had been chewed off by a mouse during winter. At first I thought it was some kind of very pale mushroom that grew in the pot but then I saw it was the “dead” little tree in each pot that suddenly had started to grow and since there was no light on they were pale white 🙂 🙂 🙂

So I brought them up and placed them light but not in the sunshine. The soil was a bit damp in one pot but more or less bone dry in the other. The thing is that we tend to think a plant that hasn’t had water in the long run will love to be drenched but they don’t because that’s when we kill most of our plants, so I’m now slowly, slowly watering the pots so that they’ll have a chance to start functioning again before I can water themm like usual. That can take a few days before that happens. The problem is that they now are out of sync with how and when they should have started to grow but that’s a later problem 🙂

Have a great day!