Us Slap-dash Gardeners

The English garden – all rambling roses, nasturtiums, peonies, some well-tended exotics in the front. And at the back, neat rows of peas, well-behaved tomato plants, runner beans, herbs… right? So also the Indian garden – fragrant creepers obligingly running a relay between themselves so that something’s in bloom all year round; masses of marigolds and flaming hibiscus for the gods, perhaps a mango tree, some drumsticks for the sambar, green and sprightly coriander waiting to be plucked… right?
Well that idyll is not for all of us. While there are no official estimates, it would be safe to guess that at least, at the very least, 60 per cent of the enthusiastic gardeners of the world have gardens that only very vaguely resemble the frothy, gorgeous outpourings that emanate from those green-finger books and magazines.
We slapdash gardeners are a breed apart. Our gardens, quite routinely, march to their own drummer, completely ignoring our grand (or modest) schemes. And yet, amazingly, we soldier on, always hopeful, always planning, and ultimately, easily pleased by even small rewards.
Only once in a while do we feel like giving up and abandoning that vermicompost pit and going out and buying some powerful boost-n-feed made in a chemical plant and packaged with all kinds of warnings. Sometimes we’re disheartened enough to consider just paving the whole place up, leaving no patch of soil to tempt us into gardening anymore. And on really low days, we may even flirt with the idea of going out and buying artificial plants. But this phase doesn’t last long. The die-hard romantics that we are, hope springs eternal in our hearts.
It’s not easy, for sure. When other people declare that they’ve never ever needed to buy limes, because their little shrub gives them a least 25 every week, we could think murderous thoughts – about these lucky other people, or about the obstinate little lemon tree in the back of our house. That one who you chose at the nursery because it had at least 5 lemons and plenty of new leaves, but who went into some kind of deep sulk and shed everything a few weeks later in your garden. It’s been a year now, and that lemon tree has no plans of flowering or fruiting. Sometimes it will yield a couple of fragrant leaves that you may pluck to put into your Thai food (note: other people have the real thing – kaffir lime – growing in their garden) – but not before it jabs you with some well-developed green thorns. Oh well. Adolesence, you say to yourself.
That haleconia bulb that you smuggled in through your baggage from Singapore and pleaded innocence to the x-ray man at Mumbai airport…you’d imagine it would have more consideration for you. But while a fellow gardener has enough brilliant lobster-claw blooms to make his garden look like its on fire, yours puts out plenty of leaves and then one day calls it a day.
Fed up with coaxing exotics to repatriate in unfamiliar soil, you march out and buy a bunch of sunflower seeds – be local, buy local, grow local you say sanctimoniously. But when you’re expecting a stunning bank of towering plants with massive blooms looking obediently at the sun all day long, what you could well have, for no reason understood by mere mortal or gardener, is the whole thing in miniature: one day you notice, very close to the ground, pea-sized blooms on inch-tall plants. Like someone nuked them, and they mutated; or like you suddenly turned large like Alice.
This is when you call in the experts – the gardener who wears his white cloth cap sideways, takes a look at your patch of stragglers, and mutters in the local language: strength gone. Upon which you are convinced to bring in loads of new mud, pull out all the stringy, no-good offenders which you had planted with such hope, and leave your garden to ‘rest’ for a while (like it was working so hard anyway).
The next great white hope is the monsoon. Once the rains come, everything will be sweetness and light, you are told. And so you’re on to another cycle of hope and renewal.
The up-side for us slapdash gardeners, is that our gardens yield quite unexpected bonuses. No, not in the form of a huge harvest of jasmine flowers that we once imagined we would elegantly place floating in an urli in the centre of our table; and sorry, not avocados (though we did plant 3 seeds, and they did sprout obligingly and even grew 3 feet tall)…but a bonus of quite another kind. Like the chattering pair of sunbirds who choose to build a nest in your garden because it seems untidy enough to signal that no humans are working too assiduously here. Once you spot the beginnings of this higgledy-piggledy home, you will be treated to the site of the olive green and pale yellow female building busily over the next 8-10 days. She will make at least 50 trips a day, bringing bits and pieces, chattering in an excited small voice, as she adds to the overall design.
Or there’s that other surprise waiting for you. What look like scrunched up toffee wrappers, hanging under the leaves of the non-performing avocado plant, are tiny-shiny pupas. And on one of those days you’re staring disparingly at your garden, you get to see an incredibly beautiful, huge black and white butterfly emerging from the toffee wrapper and sunning itself in the early morning rays.
Now would you have got to see this stuff if you had one of those tidy gardens where you or the gardener were constantly pruning, spraying, tying back, and generally making your industrious presence known?