We bought three bare-root fruit trees from Lidl the other week (€15 the lot), so thought we should probably try to plant them somewhere.
This has proved a lot harder than you might think given the vast area available to choose from, although you might understand it better if you’ve ever seen me try to pick a parking space in an almost-empty car park.
Anyway, the actual trees might be an exciting surprise, as one of them didn’t have a tag on it, and at least one of the other two looks like it might have had another (probably different) tag on it at some point too.
First in the ground was the tree claiming to be a sweet cherry (Hedelfinger):
I’m an unbelievable gardener I think it’s fair to say, but I appreciate that some readers may be unfamiliar with some of the finer concepts surrounding digging holes, fecking plants into them, and then covering them back up with soil. The other side of that cherry tree tag featured a bunch of potentially mysterious runes, which to the uninitiated presumably resemble spells that must be cast in order to achieve the pictured fruit output.
I’ll take you through the meaning of each, using colours to aid annotation:
Yellow: we’re starting with the easy stuff. Sometimes the sun rises. Sometimes a cloud goes in front of the sun. Sometimes the sun goes in front of a cloud and it ends up looking a bit like a fried egg. Don’t worry – chill out. Circle of life stuff. The bit on the furthest right is someone making two peace signs with their hands. I✌- ✌
Cyan: things are getting a bit more technical now. This cartouche actually relates to Pope Pius XII (Hitler’s pope, and the patron not-quite-saint of cherry trees). He has yet to be beatified due to the ongoing challenge of finding sufficient miracles that can be attributed to him, and this is giving you the chance to help him out. This section encourages you to attack the young tree with shears – if the result is somehow an adult tree that is between 200 and 400cm tall, the arrows indicate that you should contact the powers that be to get that promotion sorted.
Red: once the cherries are ripe, make muffins with them and go on a quirky holiday to the Romanian village of Lopatari as a reward for all your hard work. You can sit in wonder watching the Living Fires (Focurile Vii in Romanian) while chomping through the baked goods at your leisure.
Green: wherever you spit out a cherry stone, a great new tree will flourish. Cool.
Purple: this is the only one I’ve really struggled with. I think you’d have to be some freakish hybrid of Alan Titchmarsh and Jean-Francois Champollion to fully grasp the meaning of this, but I’ve had a go. We’re clearly looking at a severed reindeer head, that much anyone could establish. I’m going to have to get back to you on the significance of this imagery, however.
