Kristina Šeniauskienė from Vilnius says she maintains her spectacular flower garden outside her apartment block for her own health and for the admiration it draws from neighbours and passers by.
The 200-square-metre flower garden near an ordinary block on Taikos Street, in the district of Justiniškės, has become a minor tourist destination. Šeniauskienė confirms that people come to admire the flowers from all over Lithuania.
“People come to visit their relatives and make sure to visit this garden. People come from Panevėžys, Kaunas, Palanga, Klaipėda, Šiauliai. They talk to me and I always ask them where they come from,” says the woman.
Šeniauskienė started installing the flowerbed nearly 15 years ago. She was living on the ground floor of her apartment bloc and was not happy with the “wild shrubbery” she was seeing through her windows.
“I thought: I’ll plant a few flowers, tidy up a bit. There were such ugly bushes. So I started. Then I saw that I could do more and more,” she laughs. “In the end, I wanted to have a unique garden, unlike any of the other apartment blocks.”
Kristina admits that there are several other gardens in the neighbourhood, dominated by Soviet-era concrete panel buildings, but she believes that hers is quite unique, calling it “flower cakes”.
“This is my personal style. You won’t find it anywhere else,” she says.
In addition to plants, she has been bringing boulders to build intricate flowerbeds. Most of the stones come from various construction sites.
"I asked the janitor for wheelbarrows, and wherever there’s excavation work, I’d show up with the wheelbarrow,” Kristina laughs. I’d ask the workers: Boys, where do you put the stones? I was told that they were burying them back in the ground. So I would ask them to put it aside for me. They’d joke: What are you going to do with them, make soup? I laughed and said, no, I’m going to make flower beds.”
Šeniauskienė needs the stones to shape the “flower cakes” that have become to define her garden. The name was given by the neighbours.
“I make something and then I look out of the window to see if people stop, if they admire it, if they like it. If they do, then I come up with something more interesting, more spectacular, something more elaborate to surprise them,” says urban gardener of Justiniškės.
“One day I opened Google Maps and there it’s tagged – Kristina’s garden. For six years now, my yard has been a well-known and visited destination.”
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
