The practical utopia of Sara Parkman's secret garden

Four springtimes later, apprenticed to unruly island weather and luck, my grasp on tending the L-shaped patch of land remains almost as wretched, idling on the learning curve somewhere near zero, botanically hopeless and deaf to the earth. It’s okay, I tell myself, I have always belonged more to things that move toward me. Music, lovers, dogs. Things that learn to tolerate, even forgive, my clear lack of routine. I know how to care for those more insistent things, but the discipline of gardening seems light years beyond me. I just don’t have that kind of focus, not yet – there are too many records I still haven’t played, too many places I still have to go.

At any rate, the groundwork goes on. For my birthday one year I got a copy of filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, perhaps the definitive book for learning to work with a garden that resists you, but the stillness of it scared me. “Now I have rediscovered boredom,” he wrote of his life at Prospect Cottage, “where I can fight ‘what next’ with nothing,” and a chill ran down my spine. Later I tried to get on with The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing, who, like me, was a writer-come-lately to a backyard of one’s own, but the lavishness of it got a little much. 

I did like, though, that both books frame the garden as a site of contradictions. Not necessarily crowded with them, as in Hieronymous Bosch’s mindboggling triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights hanging in the Prado, but still morally and emotionally charged. After all, a garden is never just a garden but a form of layered composition, a place of choice and non-choice acting in tandem – what we choose to cultivate and what we let wither away, and what dies and rots regardless.

On her upcoming album Aster, atlas – out in May – Swedish folk experimentalist Sara Parkman is similarly rapt with many of the same ideas about gardens, which started as “a metaphor that grew from a seed and turned into a blueprint.” Germination began three years ago, among the mountain peaks of southern France, where she and her partner had retreated to a village, not far from Nice, to regroup from the exhaustion of touring and come back to life. Already at the time she’d been a touring musician for more than half her life, since the age of 15, but lately it had felt more like a slog than a calling. “I felt quite sad,” she admits, shaking her head. “Because when you work with something you really love and you suddenly get tired of it, it’s like being in a relationship with someone who doesn’t feel it anymore. You just ask, ‘Why?’”

Chatting over coffee and biscuits at her studio in Stockholm, Parkman speaks thoughtfully, often with her eyes closed, sometimes reaching for the Swedish words for not easily translatable ideas. Like nåd, for instance, which can mean ‘mercy’ or ‘grace’, or even ‘clemency’, depending on the when or why it’s used. It’s a feeling she says she had there in France when she stumbled upon a small, seemingly forgotten cloister garden, arranged in traditional quadrants and run slightly, magically wild. Finding a bench there, she pulled out a book and sat reading for a while, and that’s when it hit her. Boom! Nåd. A sudden, unexpected sense of reprieve, of faith in her life’s path regained. “It’s hard to put it into words because it can sound kind of banal,” she says, laughing. “Like if I say it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, what does that really mean? But when you are there, when you are in the moment, it’s really a feeling of wow. And it was so very silent. For the first time in a long time, I think I heard myself.”

Fixating on that feeling, on the journey home and beyond, Parkman couldn’t help but turn it over in her mind. What is the power of a garden? What is it a symbol for? What does it contain? Or, more to the point, what doesn’t it contain? Drawn to the idea of a hortus conclusus, the Latin term for an enclosed garden, she began to consider it as an architecture through which she could trace the whole arc of existence, from planting and tending through to reaping and returning to the soil. The bending, the waiting, the thinning out, the letting go: the work is the thing that gives the beauty meaning. As Rudyard Kipling wrote in his poem “The Glory of the Garden”, “A garden is not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade,” echoing the words of author Edith Wharton, whose writing often celebrated gardens not only as sites of cultural importance but as sites of labour and care. With its central theme of ora et labora (Latin for “prayer and work”), Aster, atlas feels very much aligned.

For Parkman, who was born into a long line of priests and church folk, the prayer element of the record doesn’t necessarily have to do with religion, it can be something as simple as hope. “I think that hope and work are so connected,” she says. “If you look at history, and especially the invisible work of women, who have always been there taking care of things, it’s their work that has actually built the society we live in, and I think we have forgotten that. We’ve forgotten that we need to work together, to create spaces where we can meet and create and rebuild our communities. We need to come back to our love of work.”

Not from a capitalistic perspective, she clarifies, but work that is sustaining, work that can transform. The same ethos extends not only to her music but also her role as head of Supertraditional Records, a label she launched in 2019 as a hub for experimental folk acts from the north. Having gotten off to a flying start with her own album Vesper, a provocative exploration of spirituality in a time where faith is too often wielded as a smokescreen for division, the label has come to define the contemporary folk scene in Sweden and beyond. Of the five Best Folk Album nominees at this year’s Swedish Grammis, three are from the Supertraditional stable: BITOI’s Sirkulu, Egil Kalman’s Nordafjells, and Lena Willemark & Ale Möller’s NORDANKVÄDEN. Parkman’s last album, Eros Agape Philia, took home the same award in 2023.

Aster, atlas was shaped by transformation, too, in fact much more broadly than Parkman had intended. “I think the concept was stronger than the content at first,” she says, laughing, explaining how her first idea – to make an album more literally about gardening and gardens – soon came unstuck. There are only so many ways a person can write about a beautiful flower, she jokes. It was through travel that the garden metaphor deepened and the landscape of the songs began to bloom. From Niki de Saint Phalle’s Gaudi-inspired Tarot Garden in southern Tuscany to the Caucasus mountains of Georgia, where she spent two weeks at a residency, and closer to home at the research library of the Sigtuna Foundation, Parkman’s thoughts journeyed from physical work to emotional labour, from modernist thinkers to mystical inquiry and the natural power of three.

As with Eros Agape Philia, which was built around three ancient Greek words for love – eros (romantic or passionate love), agape (divine, selfless love), and philia (deep friendship) – triples are important in Aster, atlas too. Though she sees the album overall as a hortus conclusus, within that walled-off space lie three conceptual gardens, each with its own musical aesthetic and cultural stakes. The first is the cloister garden she encountered in France, symbolised by the use of choirs and sacral chants; the second is the kind of pastoral garden that you might find on a farm, revealed through what she calls “mountain pasture music”; and the third, most fantastical garden, is an electronic Eden of sorts, home to the record’s more experimental textures and drones. 

Another early idea – to release each garden as a separate EP that would go on to form an album – also fell by the wayside, and 18 songs were whittled down to ten. Ultimately, though, it was Parkman’s pregnancy that most profoundly redirected the work, pushing the songs in a more introspective direction. The experimental garden, while still present in songs like “Paradiset” and Aster, atlas centrepiece “Salomos vishet”, gradually took up less space, yielding ground to the cloister, but not without a fight. “I was so clear before I gave birth that I would never write about it on an album,’” she says, laughing. “But it’s a very specific experience, going through a pregnancy. It was hard, it was painful, and all those things that people say, but it was also quite fun and very creepy on a lot of levels, so I changed some of the lyrics after I gave birth to try and capture that experience.”

What emerged from the perspective of new motherhood was a sharper understanding of what it means to harbour contradictions, and what they cost. Sort of like how The Garden of Earthly Delights moves from paradise to excess to something closer to ruin across its three panels, Aster, atlas lingers on the notion that life is shadowed always by its own arrest. But rather than painting a garden where humanity is caught between innocence and consequence, Parkman writes one where those two poles coexist, where the act of living already contains its own undoing. “Something that’s become stronger and clearer to me as I get older is that I have to sacrifice things all the time, and that’s just how life is,” she says. “When you’re young, you think everything is open and free, but when you come in closer to your forties you suddenly see what the costs are, and there’s a kind of continuous grief connected with that.”

Parkman could continue talking in circles around that, but, after some deliberation, she decides that being open might offer some insight, even solace, to others who have walked a similar path. As implied by the lullaby-ish “Tre Hjärtan” (“Three Hearts”), she was in fact pregnant with twins, two girls, but one was too small to survive. “I had to have an operation where they took away her life,” she explains. “I was so amazed that I could have three hearts in my body, and then suddenly it was just two hearts.” “But it’s not a trauma, really,” she hastens to add, having caught the stricken look on my face. “It was hard, but we got such good help and, again, that’s just how life is. A pregnancy is not a promise.” 

Life and death, growth and decay, solemnity and play. Opposites like these come up time and time again throughout Aster, atlas, two words, again from Greek, that together can be taken to mean that nothing worth having grows without effort, without some kind of sacrifice. Where “aster” is the bloom, “atlas” represents the burden, endless and immense as the sky. It’s hope and work again, in other words. Ora et labora.

On her worst days, Parkman says tending to her own garden in the Swedish heartlands was essentially free therapy, a place where she could kneel and cry, her hands in the soil, and then suddenly a flower would appear, waiting to be tended. “It became both a utopian and a very practical place,” she says, and Aster, atlas both mirrors and expands that into a sanctuary for all our ambiguities and conflicts, “a space where all the things that don’t fit together in our regular lives can actually fit together.” 

That’s where the effort part comes in, she adds, returning to the idea of the album as a hortus conclusus. “I like that it’s hidden and that it’s closed, but I want to build a ladder so people can climb in. I think the music is accessible, but I like the idea of holding it within these walls, like some kind of secret respite or refugium, a space to exist and to both work and rest in.” 

The thrill of a secret garden is at the heart of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s book My Beloved Sister, which in turn is at the heart of the Aster, atlas track “Salikons rosor” (“Salikon’s roses”), one of the songs that Parkman rewrote after giving birth. Here she sings of blood and milk, shadows and storms, mothers and witches as the music churns its way to the rousing call of a choir. Sacrifice shows up again in a crown of thorns, as do heartbeats, as if Parkman dreams of communing between worlds – like Lindgren’s heroine Barbro – to mother her lost child. “I remember I had a feeling during pregnancy that babies and music come from the same place, so I tried to write about that place,” she says simply of the track, leaving it open for others to interpret, not wanting to pull up the ladder, so to speak.

What that place of music is, and where it might be found, is something that has had a chokehold on scholars for centuries, some very scientific, like 19th century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and others more in step with the mystic, like liturgical composer and medieval baddie Hildegard von Bingen. In her own research into music and mystic traditions, Parkman has dug deep, from Ingmar Bergman’s take on music as an emotional actor, all the way back to St. Augustine, one of the earliest philosophers of music, via the 16th century and church reformist Martin Luther’s view of music as another means of grace, and the question in her mind still remains: Why does music make us feel so much?

One popular theory among theologians is that when music strikes the heart, it’s a memory of paradise lost that gets triggered, some kind of echo of the heavenly harmony of Eden. “It gives us a hint of what we lost when Eve ate the apple,” she says, and in a way that makes sense since often when the beauty hits, there’s a kind of bittersweetness to it, even melancholy. “There are so many questions we’ve answered through science,” she continues. “We know so much about what happens in the body when we’re pregnant or sick. But with music we still don’t have the answer, and that makes me happy.”

In essence, what Parkman hopes for in music is to locate a feeling of förundran, which translates in English to “curiosity” or “wonder.” As both label boss and artist, there’s often too much emphasis on what can be counted – followers, subscribers, streams, and views – and too little on the magic of how music even shows up in the first place. “Most of the time it’s just work, it’s ritual and practice,” she says. “But sometimes you get a kiss from something you don’t know, and you’re like what the hell just happened?” On Aster, atlas, for example, “Ora et labora” is a first-take improvisation that she and her main collaborator Hampus Norén couldn’t better with practice, while lead single “Svarta tråden” (“The Black Thread”) took years to complete. 

At its heart, “Svarta tråden” is a song about proximity to death and how unfair it can feel, and there’s a desperation to it too, as if begging for some hope to hold onto. Partly inspired by her sister, a textile artist, Parkman uses black thread as a symbol for grief that runs through generations, connecting child to parent to grandparent, and so on. “You don’t want the needle to stick in you, but sooner or later it will,” she explains. “In Swedish we say it’s ofrånkomlig – it’s inevitable – and I think there’s something beautiful about that.”

The songs “In manus tuas pater” (“In Your Hands, Father”) and “Odlaren” (“The Grower”) deal with inevitability too, one in the sense of trusting god’s plan and the other in embracing the circle of life; one written on a park bench in Tbilisi, the other composed on a 19th century poem. Going even further back, “Salomos vishet” (“The Wisdom of Solomon”) is an adaptation of an Old Testament story first brought to Parkman and Norén by a journalist turned mystic, or the other way around. Immediately drawn to the line “For I was taught by wisdom, she who has shaped everything with her art,” Parkman says she found comfort in those 4000-year-old words. “The text is also quite fruity,” she adds, quoting one line about “the nightly pleasure of love” with a laugh. Delivered in a rush of spoken word that breaks into a disharmonious choir, the arrangement came to Parkman by virtue of the question, what would Laurie Anderson do? “She’s my role model in this,” she says, “because although she’s doing quite serious work, she’s also really fun.”

In keeping with that spirit, Aster, atlas does hold a little space for mischief in among its harshest and most meditative moments, whether in the alien-sounding polyphonic choir of “Bära mörker” (“To Carry Darkness”) – a song that welds a verse inspired by Hildegard von Bingen with a chorus melody that grew out of the Georgian folk song “Tsintskaro” (also heard in Kate Bush’s “Hello Earth”) – or in the almost feral “Paradiset”, a duet with Tuva Syvertsen of Supertraditional band Valkyrien Allstars. Inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Parkman imagined a garden where she could collect together everything she loves, and the great women she has learned from – Niki de Saint Phalle, Moomins author Tove Jansson, and young Finnish artist Edith Hammar, who has worked on most of Parkman’s previous albums – in an afterparty setting. “It’s not erotic or sexy,” she says, “it’s just high on life.”

It's political too, though in more subtle ways than some of Parkman’s earlier, more openly provocative work. Back then, she says, her main purpose was to create music that could “exist in political or activistic environments,” and she sees Aster, atlas as a continuation of that idea. Not in the sense that she still wants to provoke – she no longer has that longing – but, for now, to be a voice that can stand in support, creating a place in her music for others to rest in, recover, and get back to the barricades. “It was a question of asking myself who am I now that I’m not young and angry,” she says, laughing. “I think that trope kind of has a best before date, maybe from around age 35 through to your 60s, because then you can be old and angry and it’s almost like you’re revived.”

At 36, Parkman feels she has to be honest about where she is in her own life and write about that place: a garden, like all gardens, of burden and bloom, a garden of devotion. “I think it’s also political to insist on empathy and beauty, and to make that kind of record,” she concludes, knowing all too well the cost of just keeping keeping-on. In other words, perhaps where Aster, atlas is most political is in its refusal to flatten Parkman’s own experience and sacrifice. Instead it asks us to listen, really listen, and maybe that’s the crux of where we’re at. Whether weeding in a patch of stubborn soil or writing through our pain, what if the most precious, ethical work today is actually attention? To ourselves, to each other, and to the world around.

I still don’t know what I’m doing in the garden, and most days I suspect that the garden knows it too. But every now and then, when a thing goes right, it feels like something moves toward me. It doesn’t last and it doesn’t go explained, but, like Parkman’s sudden gift of nåd, I’ll take it as a reason to keep going.