Tamas Biro

Tamas Biro

This picture was taken in Budapest in 1939. The little boy is Tamas, or Tomi, Biro, the son of my mother's sister, Klara Biro, nee Torok, my only maternal cousin. He is five years old in the picture. The site is the gardener training ground of the HICAA, where my father was a chief gardener. The road where Tomi stands was the 'main road' of the grounds, from the entrance on Kereszturi Avenue, 350-400 meters long, straight, until the silver fir that can be seen in the center in the background. There it turned left and led to the central building of the horticulture. The first room was the huge work room, they replanted the nurslings there on a big table. In 1990 I visited one of the former gardeners of the HICAA in Israel, who had been living there since 1948. In a small building in his garden there was the Hungarian inscription: work room. There was always a good, fresh earthy smell here. My father's office opened to the right from the work room. There were several desks in it, but only he worked here, and there was always a student appointed next to him to help him and to learn. I could rarely go in the office, my father took care so that I wouldn't disturb either him or others while they were working. On the other side of the work room started the so-called connection house. From its long, central room green-houses opened on two sides. Our house, namely my father's service apartment was behind the water tower you can see in the picture, in a big villa. A paved path led up to it, but there was also a small road behind the silver fir, in front of the big leafy trees. At the entrance there were peony, laburnum and jasmine bushes, next to them a rock garden and a fishpond with cute frogs. Among the bushes, which had yellow flowers and red berries there was garden furniture. We called it: fairyland.
Open this page