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Spice of Life : Nurturing emerald paradise, finding our heaven at home
The gardening partnership between my better-half and me often bordered on our differing moods and methods for my excessive fondness for growing vegetables contradicted her obsessive fixation to enjoy discerning subtle variance in fragrances.
Our Garden of Eden can neither boast of ornamental topiaries nor flaunt ostentatious hedges, nevertheless, it is the heaven at home that its “retired” Adam and Eve have created. Since our children settled in far-flung metropolises, loneliness sneakily crept into our lives before our resilient ingenuity got our garden its first fertile start from just being a cluttered front yard. Thereon, we have had a proud lineage of healthy green foliage with proper ‘family’ planning that has reaped us a heap of constructive ways not to ‘go through’ but rather ‘grow through’ our lives on Earth.
Before nurturing a garden, little did we know that its rebirth would refill our lives with unprecedented bliss, revising g(olden) parental lessons. For us, the art of tending plants was quite akin to how once we had raised our kids. Just like we trained our children in their formative years to tread the right path, so we would guide the ever-extending stems and branches of our ramblers, vines, and creepers either along the ground or around another adjoining plant or up a cemented wall, wooden stakes or trellis in the direction deemed right and safe as hawk-eyed caretakers besides periodically clipping their dead, overgrown ends.
The gardening partnership between my better-half and me often bordered on our differing moods and methods for my excessive fondness for growing vegetables contradicted her obsessive fixation to enjoy discerning subtle variance in fragrances while strolling around that would fascinate her to plant a mix of rustic and exotic flowers.
Our divergent tastes led us to draw a demarcation mirroring the LoC (Line of Control). Unlike the unyielding Indo-Pak rivalry, our domestic border ringed by a budding army of guava, papaya, mango, and orange trees, was appreciatively liable to amiable compromise. We invited each other to step into our respective dominions to exchange well-intended advice, encouraging growth on both sides of the land for shared returns.
Helping us stack up our kitchen shelves with bounteous organic fruits and vegetables, our piece of prolific land would repeatedly underline, ‘everything in our garden is rosy’. It kept our overall health in check, too.
By no means should our garden be considered inferior to the garden of England, wherein my position as titular king has more been about obeying mercurial orders issued by its undisputed queen, especially when the subject boils down to pruning shrubbery to her fastidious satisfaction.
Nothing would pleasingly rejuvenate our nasal senses more than the sweet-smelling unmistakable musty scent of home-generated petrichor emanating from rapidly drying soil and grass as our hosepipe watered the parched earth in the summer. During monsoon, watching the raindrops settle precariously on drooping leaves has personally been my up-and-close approach to our emerald paradise.
But, with carrots, come sticks! Post-rainfall, the rampant undergrowth would hijack our garden’s overall beauty, commanding both of us to assume mutinous-cum-murderous looks as we wielded a pair of sharp-toothed secateurs and scythes to uproot unwarranted infiltrators.
Unable to remain immune to its compelling pull, a flock of winged visitors would flutter their way into our evergreen territory to unmindfully regale their hosts. Butterflies and bumblebees playfully flap all about before dipping their heads into flowers to suck nectar. Gregarious birds perfectly camouflaged in trees nibble on unripe fruits until their distinctive calls would get them caught red-handed. Crows cawing in tune with twittering sparrows sounded like a musical symphony organised by Mother Nature, driving me to hum a cinematic melody, “Panchi sur mein gaate hain, bhanvre gungunaate hain.”
Courtesy our spare time and circumstantial compulsions, gardening has indeed enriched our blank accounts with healthy and wealthy returns at the ground level by gradually transforming our mundane living into a meaningful existence, blooming with a palpable sense of unequalled delight and contentment all round the year.
The writer is a freelance contributor based in Una and can be reached at unsharma3116@gmail.com.
