Head-to-tail and with a blank cheque
How ‘Mendel’s Greenhouses’ grew — part #1
It began as a vague hint of a story, a premonition.
And I still know exactly when I had it: commuting to Brussels in the early years of my employment there, and being fascinated with the tiny sliver of royal gardens I could see from the train every time we passed through Laeken.
The enormous estate, the barbed wire that seemed to serve to keep whoever lived there inside rather than keep intruders out… Something stirred, deep within me.
I also connected Laeken with my old fascination for the royal greenhouses. My parents once got the privilege of a tour there, through my dad’s work as a banker, and they brought back a big book filled with photographs that profoundly triggered my youthful imagination.
Impossible to say how the subconscious quirks of the writer’s mind work exactly, but I felt a story working its way to the surface. Something about an extraordinary world that resembled, yet wasn’t quite, ours. Something about those greenhouses as a world in themselves, or a node connecting worlds. I even had a title in mind, which had never happened to me before: De serres van Mendel (= ‘Mendel’s Greenhouses’, I have to admit it sounds better in Dutch). I didn’t have a clue who this Mendel character was (in my story, I knew about the historical scientist, of course). But it was clear from the start that this was to be the story title.
I tried to start writing it. Correction: I started writing it. I produced a number of chapters, but what I saw in my mind’s eye didn’t seem to add up to where I felt the story needed to be going. I wrote scenes about a girl traveling alone, headed for a place she didn’t know, an unusual place connecting worlds. That turned out to be a house, in the middle of a huge, overgrown garden. A nice image, sure, and the place turned out to be populated by a number of interesting characters, as well. But how was I going to get her into those greenhouses, I kept wondering. For that was what this story was supposed to be really about. The answer didn’t come. Any scenario leading in that direction seemed utterly artificial.
I let it rest, with both my simmering feeling of appetite for the story and the sense of ‘I’ve got something here, but I don’t know yet what it is, exactly’ intact.
Two years later, I got a question from a publishing house that produces educational work (school books, stories intended to help youngsters how to read…) to write a short story for ten-year olds. It was supposed to be about ‘other worlds’, but apart from that, I had a blank cheque, storywise.
I had never written for that age group before, but I reckoned: why not? I dug up my old idea about the greenhouses, and what I hadn’t managed to do for a young adult novel, I suddenly pulled off now: there is no room for long introductory scenes if you have a mere thirty short pages to tell your story. I had to write what needed to be told, and that was all there was to it.
I abandoned my dear but impossible chapters. I turned the notebook in which I had been writing around and, head to tail, started writing all over again. This time, I started inside the greenhouses straight away.
This is what I wrote:
The greenhouses are enormous.
No one knows who built them. There are times when Reya thinks they must have grown, right where they are, of their own accord.
They are filled to the brim with trees, shrubs, flowers, ferns and mosses. Inside, it is often warm, and always humid. Water will gather like pearls on leaves, trickling down gently and heading for the ground along stems and barks. The greenhouses have high domes and pathways that lead to small, hidden corners, and they stretch out further than the eye can see.
Reya has been living in the greenhouses for eleven years, which is exactly her whole life. She doesn’t know how she came to be here. Mendel says he found her one morning, curled up like a snail under a giant fern. As if she had grown there overnight. Reya isn’t sure if she believes that story, but she does believe Mendel when het tells her this is her home, and he is glad she’s here.
She doesn’t know where Mendel comes from, either. He seems to have been around forever, just like the greenhouses. There is quite a lot of grey in his beard, and he towers over Reya. But when he peers up at a big tree with his hand resting on the trunk, she can see it clearly: he is brother and father to every growing thing here.
Mendel is very busy with the maintenance of the greenhouses. He fixes what’s broken and makes sure everything works the way it’s supposed to. And he takes care of everything that grows and lives there. He claims to have known every single plant, even the older trees, as a sapling, and he knows exactly what each of them needs to thrive. He determines how much fertilizer they get and when he has to make it rain more. When he trims their branches, he talks to the trees. He will climb the highest forest giants with ropes, but he knows the tiniest tuft of moss in the most covert nooks just as well. And he can faultlessly distinguish relatively harmless creeping bugs from a hoard of gluttonous pests, which will be removed from the greenhouses without mercy.
They belong together, Mendel and his greenhouses. And Reya is home with the both of them.
I still didn’t know where this story was going to take me. But from this very first page, I felt this was somehow right. And from that moment on, everything happened naturally.
In September 2019, ‘De serres van Mendel’, a children’s novel (10+) in words and images, a joint project of writer Kirstin Vanlierde and illustrator Jurgen Walschot, will appear with Van Halewyck publishing house (Belgium). For the time running up to the publication, a blog will appear every month on how this book came to be.
