Margaret handed me my first packet of seeds when I was seven and told me they held a whole summer inside. I have been planting ever since. The garden she built raised half our town, and every spring it will keep telling her story.
In loving memory of
Margaret Lindqvist
1943 2024
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow — and she believed, always, in the quiet miracle of things that grow.”Her epitaph, carved in oak beneath the linden
A Life Remembered
Margaret Lindqvist was born in the spring of 1943 in Uppsala, Sweden, into a family that measured the year by what was in bloom. She trained as a botanist at Uppsala University, but her true classroom was always the soil beneath her hands. For more than five decades she coaxed life from every corner she touched — first in the cramped window boxes of her student years, and later across the twelve acres she transformed into the beloved Lindqvist Botanical Garden, where visitors still wander among the eucalyptus, ferns, and heirloom apple trees she planted with such deliberate care.
She had a rare gift for making growing things feel like an act of hope. Generations of students, apprentices, and curious children learned from Margaret how to read the language of a leaf, when to prune and when to simply wait, and why patience is the gardener's greatest tool. She lectured with dirt under her fingernails, believed no question about a seed was too small, and kept a well-worn notebook of every plant she ever tended — a herbarium of a life spent nurturing.
Margaret is survived by her daughter Elsa, her son Anders, four grandchildren, and the countless gardens that carry forward what she sowed. She asked that we not grieve too long, but instead plant something — and tend it. In that quiet, patient work, she believed, we would find her still.
Service
Date
Saturday, 14 September 2024
Gates open at half past ten
Time
11:00 in the morning
A shared lunch to follow
Place
Lindqvist Botanical Garden
The Linden Grove, Uppsala
A garden gathering in Margaret's memory. Wear something you'd happily kneel in the soil in, and bring a cutting or seed to share.
Memories & Condolences
She taught our whole class that the slowest-growing things are often the strongest. I still hear her voice whenever I'm tempted to rush a season. Thank you, Professor Lindqvist, for the patience you planted in us.
My grandmother's roses came from a cutting Margaret gave her forty years ago. Three generations later they still bloom by our door. Some kindnesses simply keep growing. With deepest sympathy to the family.