First concert of this season’s solo piano series. Vikingur Olafsson, playing pieces in E major and E minor, by Bach, Beethoven and Schubert.

Last season, his performance of Bach’s Goldberg variations was the high point of the series for me. I was hoping for a similar experience, but most of this one was not really to my taste. Much of it was just… too much. Frantic, dramatic, all ten fingers hammering away at a breakneck pace like there’s no tomorrow.

Somehow it becomes extra intense and overwhelming in a live performance – I listened to him playing the same set of pieces at home, and it felt quite different. Maybe because there are other things that I can pay attention to at the same time.

All the rocks I’ve found thus far – and they have been most numerous – I’ve been able to remove. Many of them were clustered around and under the cherry tree roots. Or rather, I guess, the roots were snaking their way between and over the rocks. No wonder there are so many superficial roots here – their way downwards has been blocked. The more tangled the roots, the more rocks I can expect.

There have been several large ones, a few that I’ve barely been able to lift, but even those moved in the end. This one, though, is going to have to stay. It’s loose, it moves when I push at it, but there’s just no way to roll it out of there. If there was nothing around it, I’m reasonably sure I could roll it out of there. Build a bit of a ramp, maybe. But here… stuff is in the way. There are so many roots in front of it, and the house leaves me no room to manoeuvre behind it. Even the smaller roots here are as thick as my thumb, and in the foreground, barely visible, there’s an even thicker one that I definitely don’t want to damage.

I felt unusually weak and winded when cycling to work this week. Took me several days to realize that maybe pumping the tires would be a good idea. It made a big difference – about a full gear’s worth.

And they weren’t even that soft – not visibly so, or so that I could feel it when running over small bumps in the road. Sometimes I see people on bikes where the tires are visibly squishy, flattening where they meet the pavement. It must be really tiring.

Election day isn’t until next weekend, but I really can’t see any point in waiting til then, so Ingrid and I went and voted today.

It was a bit of a special moment for us, since it was our first time. First time voting at all for Ingrid, and first time voting in the national election for me. As a resident, I could vote in the local and regional elections, but I didn’t become a Swedish citizen until last summer. So this was my first time with three votes to cast.

It used to be that you could only vote on election day. And voting used to happen at schools and libraries. These days that still happens (both voting on the day of, and voting stations at libraries) but advance voting is very common. In Stockholm at least, many voting stations are temporary “cabins”. The one closest to me is right in the middle of Spånga. Today there was a small market going on, centered on marketing booths for various political parties. Those were easy to ignore since I had already voted when we passed them – the booths of local craftspeople making beautiful ceramics were harder to ignore. (Note for future me: the bowl I bought was made by Camilla Packendorff.)

Ingrid and I celebrated this day with a glass of bubbles and a crossword.

I buy dry cat food in bulk, a 10-kilo sack once every half a year or so. Two or three times now I’ve made the mistake of deciding to carry it home from the package pickup point. Carrying 10 kg is not a big deal, I think, and it isn’t. But when the 10 kg are in an awkwardly-shaped, somewhat slippery box, they suddenly feel like a lot more. Note to self: take the car next time. Seriously.

(No, I don’t think Nysse knows what’s in the box, the bag inside it is tightly sealed. This is just what he does with boxes.)

An exhibition at Waldemarsudde, titled “In Bloom: Art and Botany” – about flowers in art. I like flowers, I like art, sounds nice. Maybe not super exciting (how exciting can a bunch of paintings of flowers be?) but pleasant, I’m sure.

How wrong I was. This was an incredibly varied and interesting exhibition, with so much more than just paintings of flower bouquets.

There were a few of those, of course. Prince Eugen, who originally had Waldemarsudde built, was fond of both gardening and painting, and some of his works introduce the theme. This first painting reminds me of one that Ingrid made, that I now realize I don’t have any photos of.

17th-century paintings of flowers were more varied than I had realized. There were paintings of individual varieties of tulips, from the tulip mania era. There were vanitas paintings to remind viewers of their mortality. There were paintings with dozens of individually identifiable species and varieties of flowers, that don’t even all flower at the same time, depicted with complete botanical accuracy

Some were cropped in surprising ways. As a photographer, one of the first things you learn is to be careful about cutting of body parts or other important parts of your subject. Do it intentionally if you want, but watch out for e.g. cropping people’s feet off. And here we have parts of a large blossom cut off. Was it actually painted like this? Was it cropped later? Is the flower behind the edge of the frame, and if yes, why? Surely if you own a painting like this, you can make sure it gets a frame that’s large enough to display all of it.

Nathalia Edenmont’s larger-than-life photos of people bedecked in flowers. Hyper-real, to the point that I started doubting whether these were even photos, or if they had been manipulated. This bring to mind 18th-century lavish court dresses, doesn’t it?

Leaving the room with paintings, there were two amazing arrangements of beaded flowers, by Georg Ragnar Levi. He is a collector of antique and modern flowers made of beads of glass, and these bouquets were made up of flowers by many different craftspeople. Just like the Dutch paintings, these have been made with great attention to botanical detail. If there are two varieties of lilies in the bouquet, then they’re not just of different colour and size, but their petals curve differently, and the proportional length of their stamens is appropriate to each one.

One room was filled with botanical books and prints, and photos of Carl von Linné’s original herbarium pages. The amount of effort that must have gone into these works is amazing.

Not just paintings and sculpture, but also embroidered works. My favourite was this one by Maja Stjärna, from a series where she has embroidered flowers on life-size canvas prints of photos of her friends.

It makes me think of tattoos. Sweden is the second most tattooed country in the world – 47% of the people have one, according to a statistic I saw. I can’t really imagine modifying my body in such a permanent way. But if I had to – gun to my head – I’d pick something floral, in a naturalistic style. Or like one of those botanical prints. Some ordinary northern European plant, like a dandelion or a cowslip, or maybe a cornflower.

A new digging project. Yay?

This spot has very different soil than what I’ve come to expect from this garden. No clay, just normal, slightly sandy soil. And roots and rocks, and then more roots and more rocks. In fact, what I’m doing here can only barely be called digging. I’m more just poking through the soil with a hooked stick, between the cherry roots, and picking out rocks.

Picked at least half the back yard clean of fallen cherries.

Some had dried in the sun; others were almost like jam, wet and warm and sticky. It was a pretty messy job.

Out of curiosity, I weighed the result. Just over 9 kg, including the bucket, so around 8.5 kg net. Also out of curiosity, I weighed and counted a double handful of cherries. 150 grams and 80 cherries. (The dried ones really don’t weigh much at all.) That would mean that I picked around four and a half thousand of these things. No wonder it took me hours.