Kalena: The lilacs in Wyoming make me feel at home

One evening in Wyoming we walk past the Gläntan at the hotel parking and a bush shines purple in the early summer skiing.

I have not seen flowering lilacs in several years. My children have forgotten how to look for happiness among five- and six-tabed petals.

« What is a Berså, » asked one of them the other day.

I thought we had to move home immediately and form our teenagers. What is a world without the enchanting scent of the oxygen?

We see them from the kitchen window in my childhood home. Purple flowers and white. New bushes and old along the stone wall towards the old park. There is still no safer sound than my dad’s steps in the gravel on the courtyard.

My interest in the garden have always been limited. But I never forget how my sister was allowed to use sandwich paper to calculate the flowers from the « flower party in the plot ». On one of Elsa Beskow’s drawings, the rose is hosted by the wives Pensé and Pion together with the Miss Honeysuckle and Syrén.

No more beautiful could be. Except for the blue one. And poppy. And pyrola.

Okay, there are more flowers than the lilacs, but none are just as strongly associated with graduates. One early summer evening we could stand for hours looking for mutations among the small flowers. Anyone who chews in a femling or sexy may wish for something.

I dare not start gnawing on the lilac bush in Wyoming. But for a short while I feel at home in a ski resort south of the mighty national parks in the United States.

The next morning I will learn that the oxygen bush is invasive and a threat to biodiversity and that it can be banned in Norway where one can ignore the EU rules. At SVT stands a gardener from my childhood town Karlskrona and says that both salesmen and customers will take their responsibility.

A cultural writer suggests that we attack the real abomination of the gardens instead. She refers to the wooden deck that swells over all the boards on Swedish plots.

Read More boutssuch as kalena About how unsteady the weather is in Minnesota’s Swedish countryside.