Time and Thyme make great companions
Our modest home on the coast in South India had Moringa trees in the backyard, which offered iron-rich leaves and tender drumsticks. Neem trees spread over the narrow street outside, offering shade, and jasmine creepers and curry leaf plants adorned our front yard.
My mother was their sole keeper.
Occasionally we helped her water the garden with a transparent hose snaking its way out of our kitchen tap. My knowledge then of the flora was confined to school. There, I pressed flowers and leaves between pages in my record notebook and wrote Latin names with fine 2B pencil under the watch of our sweet-voiced Botany teacher.
My closest brush with gardening happened in my teen years in Zambia. My engineer father was posted in Kitwe, a charming mining town. My mother assigned me to water the garden every alternate day in return for a first shot at the sweet mangos in the backyard. I spent more time drenching our dog and ended up being dismissed within days and relegated to waiting in the line for a slice of the mango.
Thirty years later, our small garden in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, rekindled my nascent desire for gardening. Absalom, a shy, bashful, tall young man with large hands and a gentle voice, arrived at my doorstep one Sunday morning. I audaciously appointed him as our ‘Gardener in Chief’ despite being advised that he possessed no such credentials.
On Sundays, I trailed Absalom as he sheared away every flower and leaf and dispatched them to their eternal glory. At the end of this ‘shear-happy’ hour, Absalom stomped up to my kitchen door and declared in deep-throated voice, “Madam, I have cleared the garden.” Absalom’s wide, happy smile never failed to melt my heart. I struggled every Sunday to keep the garden away from Absalom’s shears but never once considered sacking him.
Next, in Nairobi, I encountered Tom, who was a tad more accomplished than Absalom. He had been a ‘real’ farmer’ in his previous life and knew how to do his job.
Tom the ‘Gardner’ wormed his way into my phone directory, spent hours peering into the remote corners of our intimidating garden, and drew up a plan to clean, de-weed, prepare, and plant afresh before the rains set in. An army of men and women were deployed to search the lawn with a fine-tooth comb for weeds. Truckloads of soil, manure, and compost arrived, and neat garden beds were created. Tom used multiple mobile phones and zipped around in a derelict Toyota sedan, handling heavy-duty landscaping imaginatively. The Toyota carried his workers, the manure, seeds, plants, and one day even his four-year-old chatty son. Tom’s eyes shone when he outlined his plans for our yard, drawing me into his imagination. Our front yard was transformed soon into a delightful fairyland of flowers and creepers. Sunbirds swung on hibiscus branches, and butterflies flitted over little daisies near our living room windows. A lemongrass cutting placed near the kitchen window took off with little coaxing. It contributed to several servings of Tom Yum soup and Thai green curry.
Without Tom and Absalom to fall back on, I resorted to virtual tutorials to learn gardening when I arrived in Australia. With a big yard, a rudimentary gardening experience, and an almost paralysing inability to figure out my life, I stood for hours by our living room window and stared at the overflowing weeds. I tried hard to process the grief of losing my mother and the uncertain feeling of the ground shifting beneath me that only a new home in a new location can bring.
A monk had trimmed the lawn with scissors once. Six hours of trimming the lawn had given him a perspective about life, he claimed. I, too, cut the green patch outside my living room window with a pair of kitchen scissors, focusing on each blade as I let go of my fear and my sense of loss. However, I got cross-eyed peering at the edges of the grass, suffered a backache from continuous bending, and gave up searching for that perspective before long.
I purchased a weed torch online, pored over the instruction sheet, and learnt to turn on the butane gas canister to use my newfound weapon against the battalion of weeds. My virtual guru, the Garden Ninja, cautioned me from annihilating the lawn with the torch, alongside killing a few good plants too.
Armed with ‘The Waterwise Australian Natives’ and taking cues from the Gardening Australia show, I mulched, composted, pruned, and plotted. Grevilia, Kangaroo Paw, emu bush, Callistemon, Leptospermum, tea tree, and bush mint grew alongside jasmine, geranium, and lavender. Thyme, oregano, and mint vied for my attention.
Vegetable beds filled with broad beans, cabbage, peas, and broccoli saplings competed for space. Bugs and white butterflies met their end after imbibing an oriental concoction of a vile-tasting Indian digestive and dishwashing liquid mixed in equal measures. And Tommy toe tomatoes provided a record yield. Marinated in olive oil and black pepper, they transported my husband to the olive groves of Tuscany.
I was now ready to up my game.
When the first signs of spring appeared a year later, I planted the seeds I had bought from Tasmania and watched the young life emerge.
I placed the saplings carefully in chosen spots propped up with ornamental trellis and fancy wooden stakes. YouTube regaled me with pictures of the purple berries and the alluring climbing vine showcasing mild yellow flowers, and I awaited a bumper crop of billiardia longiflora (aka purple apple berries)
A month later, the first flowers appeared. They had a suspicious purple tinge, nothing like the yellow flowers I had seen on the seed packet. My virtual Guru, the Garden Ninja confirmed the bad news. It was a weed called Fumitory, not the berries I had waited for!
Twenty little seedlings sprouting light purple flowers watched me as I stood in my nursery pondering over their fate. I was not yet ready to give up. They may be weeds, but they too were a labour of my love.
Jenny Bhatt, in her article ‘But let us cultivate our garden’ https://themillions.com/2018/11/but-let-us-cultivate-our-garden.html. quotes writer May Sarton,
“Gardening is an instrument of grace. The garden is growth and change, and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.”
Digging the soil, chasing the weeds, feeding the worms, planting the seeds — with patience and time, my attention shifted from pain, and grief towards content, colour, and new life.
Thyme and time had brought grace and life back to me.
END
