Amresh Jokhoe (31) bought a few years ago, when he was still in a 21 . studio square meters and he was not doing well, a pancake plant. He put the plant in front of the window, watered it and removed a leaf every now and then. Soon the plant was forming new branches and leaves and Amresh recovered. He bought another plant, found another on the street, and in no time Amresh had about two hundred plants in his room and was called ‘the plant doctor’ by his housemates.
Last year, Amresh moved some of his plants to a ‘mixed housing community’ in De Meern, where he lives with ‘special residents, such as ex-homeless people’. Amresh was given a private garden measuring three by three meters in a two-room apartment. The garden was delivered as an empty slab of earth with some privets around it. Amresh planted a grape, a few bushes of lavender, and some discarded plants he found along the road. And again the plants immediately began to grow here.
When he tried to drive two wooden posts in his garden to hang a hammock, river clay got stuck on the auger. The clay, a greasy, gray-red substance, was less than half a meter deep in the ground. Amresh drove the posts into the earth after all and hung up his hammock. When he walked past the city library at the station last month, he found a book about the geological history of Utrecht. He took the book home and read that a river had flowed beneath his house, which had grown as a tributary of the Rhine in the Bronze Age. The river was later called the Heldammer Stroom and meandered about four kilometers through the middle of the Netherlands. Romans used the stream for their settlements and border posts, and farmers in the late Middle Ages grew their grain on the banks of the river. What if I dig further, what else do I find here, Amresh thought, after finishing the book.
The greenery is now almost out of his garden. The four posts of the wild square meter are almost invisible because of the tall grass, the buttercups and the young shoots of a linden and an elm. The soil is always moist, even with the persistent drought. The clay of the Heldammer Stroom keeps the water in the ground, Amresh suspects. He is allowed by the municipality to occupy a meter from the sidewalk in his garden. Tiles out, plants in. He leaves the treasures of the bottom for the time being, the old river also shows its riches above the ground.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 19, 2022