Cornflowers

Grandma used to plant them, a summer flower having a dandelion-like circle of blue petals. Auntie Johanna had sent her seeds from Estonia, to give family in far-off exile a reminder of the old country. She would tell us in her letters the mosquitoes were as big as horseflies, or that the nightingales were in song.

The rukilill is Estonia’s national flower. Planted in spring, they flower progressively, giving blooms for several weeks. In my mother’s herb border, they stand nicely with the purple flowering of sage, rosemary, chives, oregano, thyme and borage. Bees like them, mostly bumblebees nowadays, the varroa mite having largely carried off wild honey-bees.

The colour is rukilillsinine, “rye-flower blue”, represented as the top stripe of the Estonian national flag. When spring arrives in New Zealand, I plant them, thinking of faraway family and friends, present and past.

Grandma grew the cornflowers along the path in front of her flat, carefully weeding the soil around them, knowing she would never return to her homeland. Erika did not speak of Estonia much. New Zealand is our home now, she said in English, and our future.

For a long time I thought the same. I learned Swiss-German and Spanish. I lived in Switzerland, and then in Spain and in Chile. On return to New Zealand, I made my life and work here, rejoining the Swiss Club, serving on the committee and reconnecting our Swiss family with that heritage. I now edit the Swiss Society magazine, the Helvetia.

Yet, the call of the wild persists, of a millennia-old land and language. This, at a time when the first settlers in New Zealand – the tangata whenua or “people of the land” since the late 1200s – are pressing for more political power and participation than others. Meantime our society has left the dark colonial era far behind; we are now more diverse and complex, and, for now, a democracy. Inward migration is massive, because we need it. Talented New Zealanders are leaving en masse, in search of a better or different life elsewhere.

I applied for and gained Estonian nationality, am learning the language, and travelled to the old country in 2023 to meet family and friends, and visit the places of our ancestors. We discovered a country with a positive vision of its future, having unshackled itself only 34 years ago from a dismal Soviet past, which generations of Estonians had to endure.

Johanna’s letters from the farm enclosed black-and-white photographs of family funerals. They showed a striking tableau: a black coffin with a large white cross, borne on a dray pulled by a single horse, a cortège of people of all ages wearing their Sunday best, heads bent in silent reflection, people almost without exception I never knew in person. We saw those photos again when visiting the last of the old guard in Iisaku, in northeastern Estonia – she is now in her 90s.

We cycled to the cemetery at Kunda where some of our family rest, a link to the Lehovas’ past where their stories come alive. I can see Mart, my father’s grandfather searching out curved limbs of trees in the forest, to carefully cut and dry them, to then carve rocking chairs during the winter. His and Emilie’s six children grew into adults, each to have their own destiny that no one between the wars could have predicted: Robert and Bernhard sent to the gulag, Karl escaped to Sweden, Artur to die before his time in a hunting accident, Johanna to stay on the farm, and Erika and her son to flee to Germany, and, ultimately, to New Zealand.          

Close to two years after our Estonian cycling trip I can picture in my mind the cornflowers growing in Estonia, as summer returns to this northern land.