[Click here to read the previous article in this series.]

In Ruurlo we had a big garden behind the house.  It was separated from the house by a road and the place used to be the ground of an old and small farm house that was known as the “Griebus.” 

When I was about 14 or 15 years old I buried a horse-chestnut somewhere in this garden.  A few years later I discovered that it had germinated and grown into a little tree of a few inches high.  I asked my father if I could plant the little tree on the lawn where the bird-cherry used to be.  He said it was okay.  I planted the chestnut tree on the spot.

At the time that I had become a father myself, some seventeen years later, my father had to sell the garden to the municipality.  He had retired from the shop and my brother Rob had taken over.  The municipality changed the infrastructure of the village; it now wanted to use the space as a parking lot.

Just before the garden was handed over to the village, I went to have a last look and I saw that the chestnut tree had borne seeds.  I gathered some, photographed them on the spot, and took them home to Amsterdam.

We used to live on the second floor of a house in one of the busiest streets in Amsterdam, the Linnaeusstraat.  We had a small balcony and I put the chestnuts in a bucket filled with earth.  They too germinated, and they stayed in the bucket until we left Amsterdam some four years later.  We went to live in Huizen.  Our house had a big garden.  We decided to plant the little trees there.  Through the years the strongest one survived and it is a big tree now.  Two years ago, when it was twelve years old, it gave its first chestnuts.  It bore none the year after, and this year it’s full of them.  A few years ago, a chestnut-tree disease hit Holland; it’s affected about forty percent of all the trees in the country, and there is no treatment against it.  We hope that our tree will be spared.

I am telling this story to illustrate the meaning and importance of knowing where one comes from.  The connection that you have with your past and place of birth I think is a very strong one.  Whenever you meet a stranger, one of the first questions you’ll be asked is where you come from.  Your roots will tell the other person so much about you that it may even be decisive for any further conversation.  That can be a prejudice and used in the wrong way, but finally it is all you have.  I think that one should never deny it and that it should always be respected by the other.  During my travels through Europe (and the rest of the world) I have always tried to show the same respect to others as I would like them to show me and only very rarely I met suspicion.

On the right: the chestnut in its 15^th year on 22/6/2007 10:09.












[Click here to read the next article in this series.]