I don´t know if the heart called me, or if I called the heart, but two weeks ago I started thinking of building a heart in my garden. There is a dull slope from our veranda and down to the lawn. It´s pointing east and has a lot of sun during spring and summer season – a perfect place for a flowerbed with the shape of a heart. And what would I fill it with? Well, tulips of course, lots and lots of tulips. We Swedes are crazy about tulips, in fact we are one of the largest buyers of tulips when spring season comes. Why then? Well, I believe here in the north of Europe we are so so tired of the winter darkness, and when spring peaks out we want colors and colors and colors. Tulips!

I decided to build a heart of tulips. A week ago I bought lots of different sorts of red tulips at a huge garden shop north of Stockholm. Don Quichotte, Cummins, Red Shine, Pacific Pearl, Bastogne, Blue Diamond, And topped with a few black and white as a surprise among the others – Black Hero, Purple Prince and Ice Wonder. What names! They all sound like some ancient knights, don´t they?

And perhaps they are. The more the heart took form in my head, the more it came to be a symbol of love and empathy. A heart for the world.

So how did I make this unusual flowerbed? I started measuring out the area. With sushi sticks. The size is about six yards high and four yards wide (5 x 3 meters). It took a while before I was satisfied.

The digging started. First I cut the edge of the heart with a spade, continuing with cutting out piece after piece of the lawn inside the heart. It took me nearly eight hours to dig the whole heart. There were a few bigger and smaller stones that had to be coaxed out. It did not seem much, but when I looked at the heap of stones I realized it was.

I don´t know how many loads with the wheelbarrow I drove from the heart and up to the compost. Loads that also emptied the heart of soil, so I needed to fill it with fresh soil. Six big bags of soil from the local store made the heart a cozy place for all the “tulip knights”.

While I was busy planning, digging and filling with soil, our neighbour’s ten year old son helped me with some of the “bling bling”. I wanted to fill out the borders of the heart with pine cones. It looks nice, it makes it easy to see the border and I hope the cones with help stop the soil from being washed away by autumn rain.

Now to the creative and artistic part. I put all the bags of tulips beside each other, just to admire and enjoy the colors of the photos. Also I divided the heart into two parts, a right and a left one with a piece of string between two sushi sticks. Every bag of tulips I shared equally between these parts of the heart, but was not so strict inside the parts, just spread the bulbs out more or less stochastically.

Planting was easy. In the planting store I found this very simple little scoop. You just press it down to the desired depth and then pull – and all the soil follows, leaving a nice hole to put the bulb in. With the bulb in the hole, one presses the handles together and – whoops! – the soil in the scoop let go, covering the hole. I suppose many of you already know this tool, but it was new to me and I was like a child with a new toy, playing down all the bulbs with a smile.

And this is the result! For protection, so the deers will not dig it up in the winter, I will put    chicken wire over it. Also I am thinking of planting the new sprouts of strawberry I got this season, to make the heart a green bed. Hopefully the tulips will give joy in springtime, and the new strawberries will give tasteful berries in June and July.