Reaching again towards light

I was repotting a hibiscus last week when I spotted a familiar sapling behind it. Sandpapery leaves, slender stem: Purple Wreath (Petrea volubilis). I looked around and found more. Pot after pot, nearly a dozen saplings of the purple wreath had quietly taken root across the garden. The mother tree they came from had died two years ago of root rot. Yet here it was, or rather, here were a dozen versions of it, hiding in pots across the garden. The mature seeds in those papery winged sepals had quietly landed, germinated, and grown while I wasn’t looking. The tree had been planning its return long before I planned mine.

I had been away from the garden for nearly three months. I lost my mother in December. Of course, I walked through the garden, watered, pulled a weed here and there. But I wasn’t present in the way a garden demands. My hands were not in the soil.

February is the month of reckoning. Spring nudges at the edges. One morning, I finally picked up the secateurs. Shivaratri had arrived, and the winter leaves were falling away. The rain trees in my neighbourhood were doing the same, shedding old leaves and pushing out fresh ones. That is always a reliable cue. When local trees renew themselves, it is time to prune our garden.

I had been looking at the wilderness for weeks, knowing it needed to be cut back. The mango tree had spread its canopy wider. The bougainvillaea had new flowers. Even the birds returned, testing newly opened branches, arguing noisily. I realised that the garden doesn’t need us as much as we think. It will go on without our attention. But we need it more than we know, for the garden is where many of us go to mend.

I started with the hard prune. Cutting back the overgrown, the leggy, the spent. I moved the sun-loving plants away from the mango tree’s expanding shade. In their place, I started a small vegetable patch. Tired pots were refreshed with new compost and soil. A kitchen garden gives back in weeks. Seeds of palak, methi, coriander and a few vegetables were sown. The December flower (Barleria cristata) and vajradanti (Barleria prionitis) had also sprung up in many places. I moved them to fresh pots and grouped them. The two tallest Purple Wreath saplings were moved close to the wall where they could climb. The rest were potted, gifts for friends who have admired the vine’s cascading lilac blooms.

There is something about rearranging a garden that feels like rearranging your thoughts. You move things into light. You clear what has outgrown its place.

A new spot gives a plant a new perspective, and sometimes gives you one too. Old things give way to new, eventually. That’s the mantra of life. My hands are proof of the work I did. They are rough and sandpapery like the Petrea leaves.

Thorn scratches are criss-crossing my arms. I sliced a finger while pruning, a sharp reminder that secateurs don’t discriminate between stem and skin. The cuts burn when I wash dishes. I keep applying creams to cool and heal.

I look forward to the weeks ahead. Mango season is around the corner, the grapes are forming, and the summer sun will coax the jasmines into bloom. The happy buzz ofbees will fill the garden.

And in all this, there will be a familiar figure missing: someone who loved the summer warmth, who plucked greens for the kitchen, who stood with a handful of jasmines while I reached for my camera.

Some seasons carry an absence you learn to garden around, the way a vine finds its way around an empty trellis. But the Petrea volubilis doesn’t know any of this. It only knows that a seed fell into soil, and the soil was good, and the rain came, and now it is reaching for the wall.

That is enough for a plant. Maybe it is enough for me too: to put my hands back into the earth and trust that something will grow.

Until next time, happy gardening.

Motley Garden is your monthly kaleidoscopic view into a sustainable garden ecosystem. The author believes gardens are shared spaces where plants and creatures thrive together. She can be reached at [e-mail] or on social media at @allthingsinmygarden