My Inner Landscapes

Trees talk to us. I sing to my terrace plants as I water them on warm summer evenings. I believe, this makes them happy and they grow well.

Back in the day, when my grandmother was fond of gardening,my childhood home in India had a big garden with a large variety of trees and plants, mostly flowering creepers and fruit trees. The garden is still there, though it has lost its original charm. But this garden from my childhood has had a deep-rooted relation with my inner self...

In this garden,we had a large Delonix tree (Gulmohar, as it is called in India). This tree grew very tall, but never flowered. That was when we learnt that our Gulmohar was a male variety. Our neighbor’s Gulmohar was incidentally a female one and miraculously when their roots met underground, below our fences, our male Gulmohar tree also started getting some of those crimson-red petal-like flowers!

We had a large pink frangipani (plumeria rubra) tree. I loved how in summers the tree used to be dressed in pink without any leaves, but only bright pink-red flowers. My sisters and I used to collect those flowers and make finger rings with them while playing ‘flower sellers’.

We had almost every variety of jasmine. There was a large patch of Arabian Jasmine (Jasminum sambac/Mogra) in our backyard and it had the fragrance of heaven! Jasmine climbers covered our stone house and peeped into our bedrooms through the louvred wooden windows.  

On the road- side of the house was a large climber of Tecomaria capensis. (Sankrant). Its fragile orange trumpet flowers formed a delicate orange curtain for the entire road-side elevation of the house. Passers by would stop and admire the beautiful flowers on crisp January mornings, when the Sankrant festival is celebrated.

There was a large ‘chiku’(Manilkara zapota) tree next to the swing, along the paved parking space in our garden. Its branches reached our balcony. Each branch was a ‘bedroom’ for each of us, while we played ‘house’, perched upon the tree the entire summer vacation. Our cat used to climb the tree with us to reach the balcony and sneak into the bedrooms.

There was a larger jasmine creeper at the window of my grandfather’s study. It was so dense that the cats in the neighborhood found their prey sparrows hidden in the foliage!

A large towering Indian Cork tree(Millingtonia hortensis ) stood at the northern corner of the garden where my aunt had her secret lotus pond. Each monsoon, my sisters and I used to collect the fragrant white trumpet flowers and arrange them in every vase or container found in our home.

The Callestimon viminalis or the bottle brush tree blossomed into large red flowers that adorned our garage entrance. We had banana plants, an almond tree, a cashew tree, a guava tree and three large coconut palms, in a less visited corner of the garden. The green baby coconuts were our favorite treasures found in the garden, to be “eaten” with the “brick powder soup” and wild leaves “salad” with “garden ants seasoning” when we played ‘pretend’ games!!!

There was a Clerodendrum inerme hedge bordering our house on the’ less favorite neighbor’s – side ‘I have fallen into that hedge a thousand times while my sister taught me how to ride a cycle when I was five or six.

Every tree, every shrub, every climber has a childhood memory woven into its branches, its foliage…

I had never realized this landscape connection until now. Even when I used to volunteer to go with my mum to hand pick flowers from the agriculture college for her flower arrangements, I did not understand my love for plants that was soon going to turn into something that I love to do for a living!

How the branches of the ‘albizzia ‘trees on both sides of the Deccan street gracefully joined to form a branched gateway! … how the tall millingtonias lining the Pune Film Institute, every monsoon, after school, invited my sister and I to stop and collect flowers…how the ficus religiosa (Peepal) trees rustled by the temple street…

All these memories of trees and plants from my childhood sometimes peep out and relate to my ‘inner landscapes’, subtly blending into my profession as a landscape architect. There is a reason for everything. Again, destiny dots have joined themselves revealing this link between my past and present.

Every time I have to specify plants and trees for any villa project, I close my eyes …and my mind transports me to my childhood garden.I end up choosing most of those lovely plants that take me back to my memories.There are times when routine life and its stresses make you question yourself about what you do and why you do it…I think I have found my answer.

Poet Rumi's lines sum it all up for me... “somewhere between right and wrong, there is a garden… “

I meet myself there!