My name is Autumn Leave.
I am an investigative journalist working for
The Alternative News and Interesting Facts Daily.
I have been working for them for the last 20
years.
I used to cover cutting edge
investigative cases such as truth about toothpaste and other everyday products
we use, a study determining how many people yawn when they see other people
yawn, and investigating why squirrels forget where they put their nuts 50% of
the time. But in recent years, as I have moved closer to a retirement age I
have been moved to the Obituary and Melancholic Memories section of the paper.
My writing has lost a bit of
magic, they told me. I guess it has a lot to do with dealing with everyday
life. People don’t give me a lot of
reason to believe in any magic or wonder or true beauty. If you look around you, most of the time you
see the opposite of that. People say
that I am a sceptic and a pessimist, but I just think I am realistic and
logical – qualities I thought made me good at my job. But I was assigned to the very last page of
the newspaper.
That is until now. I was requested for a specific article –
investigative in nature called “The healing aspects of a Kitchen Garden
relating to the layout and type of plants in the garden. This might not sound
very interesting to you, but kitchen gardens have resurfaced in the last few
months as a major topic of discussion after the Potager Phenomena of Basil
Brown.
She claims to have made some
extraordinary discoveries while working in her kitchen garden. Basil Brown suffers from an acute type of
depression and paranoia, mixed with an extreme phobia of crawling insects.
In the last few years, it
affected her so much that she hardly ever left her home. The technology of today makes staying at home
much easier than in the olden days, with online shopping and chat rooms
designed for specific groups of people.
She was quite content with having no contact with the outside world
except for one very old and reliable exterminator who she met online on a site
for “The frequently disheartened and doubtful of mind”.
John Cricket was as disheartened
and doubtful as Basil in his younger days, but was able to overcome some of his
sadness and loss of confidence and trust in the world, by focussing all of these
emotions on killing bugs. It was a known
fact that many people with this specific mixture of depression and paranoia
went hand in hand with a fear of crawling insects. Mr Cricket therefore had a full-time job as a
counselling exterminator. He was well-known
as the best in his line of work. He
would usually visit a person on a weekly basis, but some severe phobias
required fumigating up to three times a week.
It was Mr Cricket who told Basil
Brown about some of the pest-repelling benefits of many plants and herbs and
who suggested that she designs a kitchen garden or potager as known in French
circles.
Basil Brown started putting all
her time into creating the perfect potager.
She researched everything thoroughly and spent days planning her design
and structure. In the end she decided on
5 specific plants to use and she would plant them in a specific way that made a
lot of sense to her.
She planted a Basil plant in the
middle her little garden. Basil was a
known repellent of the Asparagus beetle.
This plant would represent her off course, carrying the same name and
with a smell that she really found very comforting.
She then planted two Venus
Fly-traps and two Pitcher Plants to act as guards, trapping and digesting any
insect that would come close to her special basil plant in the middle. She then added some decorations in the form
of Petunias – beautiful, but deadly to a variety of beetles, leafhoppers and
some other crawling bugs. Lastly she
scattered Catnip all over the little garden, in between the rest of the plants
to repel ants, a selection of beetles, including the colourful Japanese beetle
and then of course Basil’s biggest fear – cockroaches.
She attended to her garden on a
daily basis, staying outside the house for longer periods of time. Her garden started growing and blooming and
becoming more beautiful to her every day.
She started inviting some people over – other disheartened and doubtful
people who were not as confined to their homes as she was. The therapeutic effects of the garden soon
became very evident to Basil and her friends that visited felt an immense
change in their mood and general sense of trust in the world, while in the
garden. They also realized the longer
they stayed in it, the longer their new-found cheerfulness lasted. Quoting Basil Brown” “It is as if our hearts have been touched by
some sort of magical power inside the garden.”
Now, many other people have
kitchen gardens, myself included and even though there is some therapeutic
value in being in a garden for some people, nobody else have claimed to
experience the amount of happiness in their gardens that Basil and her friends
experienced. If there was any truth in
this, you could deduct that it had to be the specific selection of plants she
used as well as the very specific way in which she planted it.
My assignment is to find out
whether there is any truth in this story, to interview Basil and spend some
time in her garden. I am the only
journalist she agreed to talk to – as she previously only read the Obituary and
other Melancholic Memories section of the newspaper and therefore knew my
name.
This is a really big opportunity
for me. It will be my last chance to
prove people wrong and show them that there is no more magic left in the world
and that you can a sort of contentment in accepting what is real instead of
longing for something more. So today, I
will expose Basil and her silly depression club and tell the truth. That a bunch of nutty people have a sort of
mad-hatters party in a kitchen garden once a week and that they probably all
are as much on a trip as Lewis Carol when he wrote Alice in Wonderland.
I knock on the the door…
*
Story inspired by a very interesting topic: "The Kitchen Garden" for my monthly writers group. You can read more about a kitchen garden over here.
