This isn’t so much about writing, as about gardening.

Though I’ve come to believe their philosophies aren’t as disparate as they might first appear.

To begin with, I don’t have a garden.

My parents do. At our home in Shillong. Not the most luxuriously proportioned, admittedly, but large enough to host a bamboo grove, a bird bath, a cluster of elephant palms, a guava tree on which orchids cling, and a silver pine that’s grown so tall and perfect it could serve as a model tree for Christmas advertisements. My mother is curiously unenamoured of flowers; in fact our Shillong garden is one that’s distinctly non-flowering, landscaped instead with a varietal of leafy plants for colour and texture.

For the longest time, I was also massively uninterested in gardens. (Perhaps from decades of living in small apartments in Delhi and London.)

Until, that is, a few years ago, when I was housebound for months in Shillong because of an injured back.

I’d been advised by my acupuncturist to stand in the morning sun. “Nothing heals like its warmth,” he told me. So I did. Usually accompanied by my father. And we would potter around, looking at growing things.

Across the compound my aunt’s flower-friendly beds offered more exotic, colourful distractions. A scattering of roses, pink and red, rich, moist succulents with tiny yellow flowers, dainty lady’s slipper orchids growing on a moss-ridden driveway wall, pots of pansies, frilly carnations, and generous groves of purple chrysanthemums. What I realised was one didn’t inspect the flowers so much as the lead-up to the blossom. Only if you look at a plant every day do you notice its minuscule advancements, how overnight a leaf, a petal, might have unfurled, until one day, it’s fully open, and from then on you watch its quiet decay.

The garden is a space of tremendous violence.

The unapologetic pruning, the quick cutting, the rapid turnover of seasonal flowers. One spring in, the summer out.

What I noticed was also tremendous kindness shown to plants that were sickly, or lying barren.

Here, a small tea sapling my father salvaged after it had been deemed unfit for his friend’s plantation in Bhoi. There, over a wall, an explosion of bougainvillea that, alas, never bloomed. A tomato tree near the gate that had never once put forth fruit. The challenge, and the thrill, I think, was to keep tending with patience, and hope (though with no guarantee whatsoever) of reward.

I left Shillong, healed, for Delhi before the sweet peas burst into fragrant flower in February. And found a barsati with a terrace large enough, as a friend put it, “to play tennis in”. Apart from a pot of spiky aloe vera, left behind by the previous tenant, it remained empty. I had little idea how to even start a garden. Where to look for pots, plants, mud, manure? Even if all this was available at a nursery, I didn’t have a car. Besides, there were things of more pressing importance to attend to: gas connection, fridge, new job, new book. The aloe plant remained solitary until, much later that year, when I made a tentative attempt at furnishing my terrace with flowers. They seemed to do well, the mandarin oranges shining like small suns, the tulips bursting in their boxes, and then they all died in the summer. Apart from two dwarf champas and a few hardy bougainvillea. Yet this winter, aided with the masterful help of Suresh, IIT lab technician with a green thumb, I tried again. And was rewarded with months of riotous colour — dogflowers, marigolds, phlox, snapdragons, and others whose names I haven’t yet learnt.

Unsurprisingly, my writing and gardening became intertwined.

At first merely while taking a break, and heading out. To see which plants were doing well, which needed watering, or some light, some shade.

As the weeks cooled further, I began writing amidst them, on a bench beneath the shade of an overhanging jamun tree, and noticed how life on my terrace had changed.

That there were bees, and butterflies, and in the mornings and evenings, birds. Sunbirds, and hoopoes, pigeons and parakeets. And once, a small silvery blue creature with a hooked beak that dipped into flowers. I kept out sunflower seeds for a fat squirrel we called Chihiro. A Japanese name (from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away ), which I later found out means “abundance”. And that’s exactly what my terrace garden has given me.

A thousand abundances.

A place in which each insect and avian visit feels like a blessing.

Suddenly, I no longer inhabit an isolated cubicle space in this great, teeming city; I’m plugged into a network of great fortitude and beauty. Writing is like gardening in the most obvious ways, of course, given talk of nurturing and pruning and patience, but this isn’t an exercise in the extension of that metaphor. Rather it’s an acknowledgement of how gardening has changed my relationship to writing by drawing it out into a space of lively connection.

Of realising how within both there is a wondrous interrelatedness of things. Each an ecosystem that sustains an inner life.

J anice Pariat is the author of Seahorse; @janicepariat

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