The term “weed” is no longer socially acceptable. One should not use it anymore. Eco-fanatics only speak of wild herbs as opposed to cultivated herbs. I can’t quite get on board with that. If the potato peel, which I threw onto the compost heap in good faith for it to decompose, suddenly sprouts cheerfully among…
In the bay near old fisherman Serafin, a bit west of the southernmost tip of Gran Canaria, it was there that I met a woman who turned out to be an ardent environmentalist. How she scolded the shellfish divers, who, in her opinion, were in the process of extracting the very last giant oysters to…
In 1933, we moved to where we still live today, essentially to the countryside. Today, it’s a pleasant residential area. Back then, it was a godforsaken place, accessible only on foot or, at best, by what was called a bicycle at the time, though often you had to push it the last kilometer. There were…
Green is a fascinating colour. An absolute colour. It cannot be intensified. You cannot say green, greener, greenest. That doesn’t exist. And yet there are a thousand different greens. There are blue, gray, and yellow greens. There are dark and light greens. Yes, there are even sad and happy greens and everything in between. Green…
My God, what’s going on now? Women can ask nasty questions. What’s wrong? I’m braking! I notice that! But why? Why here so suddenly and so unmotivated? What does unmotivated mean? Why can’t women understand this? Oh, what do women mean here? Nobody can understand this, nobody or only a few. There was an inconspicuous…
Sometimes you get a good reputation unintentionally and without much effort. Whenever the leaves have fallen from the flowers in the forest in front of my door in mid-October and when a soft rain has moistened these fallen leaves, I go out with my wheelbarrow, which I have equipped with a primitive but functional structure,…
As soon as I let myself be seen in the garden, that means gardening in my gardening clothes: old Manchester trousers, now called stretch cord, with the faded synthetic sweater with paint spots and runs, rubber boots and with ragged hair, then she is there immediately. She is practically tame, or rather, tame on foot,…
Quaaks is a little story that Hermann Löns wrote about a pond frog. Well, I’m not Löns, unfortunately or fortunately not. Unfortunately not, because then I would be able to write stories much better and write a lot more stories like that – fortunately not, because then I would also have his troubled blood, and…