A garden is a friend you can visit anytime
One of my favourite childhood memories is of five-year-old me playing in a garden that seemed to stretch down forever as it hugged the terraced slopes of a hill, where our blue-gabled house perched. She was a garden with a wild heart, that wore dresses of wildflowers in the summers, a cape of dark green moss in the monsoons, and a wreath of fruit blossoms in the spring. Her unruly shrubs were my friends, her overgrown trees indulgent elders, and her untamed landscape canvas for a child’s wild imagination.
Some days she was a silent audience for all the stories that a five-year old can spin, and on other days she would participate in a lively conversation that only a child’s heart could understand.
A few years later we moved back to the plains, the houses kept changing and so did the gardens. I remember a guava tree with branches invitingly low to climb onto, a kitchen garden with giant-sized okra and gourd leaves the size of the moon, an apricot tree that gave delicate blooms once in five years, and a green lawn with morning dew that I could sink my feet into.
The memories get hazier after that and conversations with the gardens fewer and less animated. How ironic that somewhere in the process of “growing up”, I lost the ability to understand and speak the language of all that grows and flourishes in nature.
Until I woke up one day, twenty-five years later, jaded and heart-broken, with a deafening silence inside that wanted to swallow me up. I was surrounded by a concrete jungle, my only soul companions a few pots of chrysanthemums and an adenium bonsai, all of which refused to bloom much less speak to me.
As I put together the pieces of my life again, I could hear a faint green echo that called my name. That’s when I decided against all advice to move into a house on the outskirts of the city. Just because it had a small green patch of grass that spoke to me of infinite possibilities. Ten years later, that patch of grass is an overgrown mess and the house that rested on it has become not only my home but also home to a free-spirited garden. Creating artwork on the sky’s canvas with the paints of the trees and the flowers.
I am slowly relearning the language of the garden again. There are days when the conversations are poetic and eloquent and then there are days when I forget the words. Even on days like those, when I am able to carve out silence and stillness in my heart, I can hear her faint whispers. Whispers in a language older than the galaxies, from a landscape of the invisible, where the wise and wild soul resides.
Come a bit closer, open your heart’s senses and let me share some of her secrets and whispers…
First Whisper : Plant your own garden, decorate your own soul
When I first started planning the garden around the patch of grass, I was like a mad artist that wanted splashes of colour everywhere. I planted flowering plants wherever I could find space. Nature being a willing gardener, soon blessed me with a lush green landscape.
The greens were not enough for me though. I wanted the flamboyance of the fiery reds, the warmth of the sunny yellows, the brilliance of the shocking pinks. It was like a hunger within me that could only be satiated by all the colours that nature could birth.
I felt as if I had woken up from a dream in which the world had lost all it’s colour, where my soul’s inner landscape was dry and barren. Waking up with the memory of the wild garden of my childhood, I wanted to recreate the same. If I had a garden that was colourful, then maybe my inner garden would reflect the same!
What I didn’t realise at that time was that plants first ground themselves by growing roots, in the soul-realm of the invisible, in a place we don’t often associate with growth. And, only when they feel rooted and held, they start growing sky-ward, in the realm of the spirit, ready to share their gifts with the world. All we need is a little patience.
Once the process was complete, the garden was soon overflowing with colours that also spilled over into my heart and soul. On days when I feel impatient with myself or with the state of the world, I can hear the garden whisper:
“Before we can bloom, we must be patient with ourselves and allow for growth”
To be continued…
