someone asked me this summer "why is it so hard if someone does something for you?". I felt exposed. I also felt like I hadn't realised that person knew me so well. I felt cared for, but also extremely uncomfortable. 

about a month before that, when those guys had fed us warmly in their home that evening, he had asked his wife to pass the bowl of chakhna to me, saying my name specifically. on receiving the bowl, without looking at anyone, without dipping into the bowl or helping myself from it, I passed it further on. I felt compelled to. almost like because he had meant it for me, I couldn't bring myself to take any of it.

but it isn't always hard when someone does something for me. and not for every someone.

I just realised today that he had apologised that day possibly not for his bag that was left with me, but possibly for making me feel uncomfortable, after seeing that discomfort in my eyes.

Laing's The Garden Against Time is like a running blog, about her restoring her garden, but also about her thinking through it, reading about it's history and the history of gardens, gardeners, Eden, paradise, land and its many effects on people and the ways in which it is used personally and politically. Its a lil bit like my own blog, but more painstakingly recorded and more beautifully written.

She is writing about finding the writings of John Clare now, his poems and his 'salvaging' of the land and its flowers around him that was being lost to private property in his time. I realised I was smiling as I read through her descriptions of his poetry and journaling about the various flowers, and realised my expression changed to one of worry concern but also displeasure as soon as she got to his documenting his ill health.

flowers, plants, birds, trees, what do they mean to us. I stare at the monsoon greenery of the neem and peepul. yesterday I saw the black Kajal like symmetric marks on the neck of a tailor bird through my Binoculars. I am continually mesmerized by the plants I tend to on my windowsills and tabletops, the Anthurium someone gifted me last week, my snake plants one with yellow edges and one without, the marbled pothos, my jade (also a gift as a baby), my arrowheads, the ficus I've been trying to rid of something that's eating it by repotting, drenching, sunning, and also giving it the prettiest pot I could find to cheer it up, and my zebra plant a pup of which is just lying unattached to the soil and still doing well. Yesterday I also finally assumed responsibility and replanted some cuttings from a basket of portulacas mom gave me (she refurbishes them for me each time they stagnate) into a lovingly bought wide round ceramic bowl. everytime before I've tried to stick a cutting into soil it has perished. This time I followed mom's instructions, very wet soil, and I was careful to peel away leaves at the bottom of the cuttings. I stuck them into the wet soil lovingly, one by one, keeping branches together wherever possible. And pinched out the soggy snail-like after-flowers, throwing them into the overgrown lane between our terrace and the next. 

these days when I close my eyes I see plants and flowers. And this morning the replanted portulacas are blooming, seemingly have had grown some roots to their new home.

this summer, in Seattle cafes, in an Oregon airbnb, and in a glass sunroom in the store of an olive farm, i finally realized how much i loved and desired houseplants. they had beautiful greens, in different shapes and sizes, some creeping down from baskets, some curling up toward the light, some variegated some marbled, broad leaves, and spindly ones, dwarf succulents and monstera deliciosa's cheese-y holes, some spineless with air roots just lazily flopping around their pots, and some so perfect they seemed almost plastick-y but gave you the feeling of life between your fingers when you reached out in doubt. i love real plants that look like plastic but hate plastic ones that pretend to look real. it wasn't the first time i had seen beautiful house plants, or the first time i loved them. two years ago in a budapest airbnb with sis and hubby, i had fallen in love with the flat with its huge bright windows on the top floor right under the red sloping roof and its beautiful stained glass and art on the walls decor with this half-tree in our bedroom, and other lovely plants around the flat which i remember i went around watering as if it was my home. even last summer in the airbnb in Oaxaca i sketched the potted plants inside, and some peeping in from the windows. in my own home in covid quarantine i had sketched some of my own houseplants, still new from the nursery, the first few sketches in my life i put color to, because the greens and yellows demanded it. houseplants btw are a very millenial thing, but also i suspect a very female thing these days. and the pandemic led many of us toward them, kinda like how it turned birdwatchers out of many of us, around the world.

what was different this summer was that i realized that some of those plants i was seeing in those cafes and in that airbnb, i myself owned, but somehow mine didnt look as grand cos i hadnt bothered to give them space, some were almost bursting out of their pots and i had forced them to remain, tying some, wrapping some round and round multiple times around their pot. what i realised was that at least a few of mine could in fact be grander than their twins oceans across if only i graduated out of being the kind of plant parent that i was - a consumerist who bought, kept, and threw away when they died, to go on to buy new ones. i realised that although that had been the pattern for the first some years of my gardening/plant parenting, something had changed without me fully realising it - that the pattern had broken for many of my plants such that they had been with me for years now and had grown, taller and wider, and were healthy to my surprise. evolution of those that survived in my environment, but also me having learned how to listen to my plants. over years i have been touching them and their soil, feeling whether the leaves feel taut or limp, whether the soil is old wet or newly watered, whether the soil needs sun or the leaves need more. and without consciously realizing, i had managed them better. i still regret the ones i have lost. the beautiful green and yellow croton, somehow all the flowering plants (other than my faithful Adenium and the Bougainvillea with who i had a complicated hard to communicate relationship but that was doing better and i recently gave it to my mom to keep it from moving between her place and mine every time i traveled), one just yesterday that i put out with garbage after trying to salvage it. but somehow the green ones that don't flower often, the ones we desire for their leaves rather than their rare if at all flowers, have been growing on me and some are even thriving now. there is something about plants that do not find it necessary to attract bees and butterflies often, that reproduce by giving off pups in their soil. my snake plants have done this in abundance and i have given them bigger pot homes twice now, the second time after returning from Seattle, inspired by the northwest, realizing it had to be done sooner than waiting to move into another home. i also saw some useful props in the Oregon airbnb, these twisy green-painted iron supports to rein in shoots reaching too far out of the pot; i now use them also to help my climbers get some height within small pots. one of my snakeplants alongwith its pups in a large pot is now a beautiful and much loved half-tree in my bedroom. yesterday i went to buy some pots and planters for a few small window ledges. i probably went to the wrong place - the mall - usually i would have gone to the shops attached to the roadside nurseries. but even then i was surprised to see most pots/planters without drainage holes in their bottom. those would work if i had inner plastic pots where the plants actually live, so a double pot system. but since i haven't been buying new plants, and only need pots to either propagate pups from old plants or to replant those bursting out of their smaller pots, these didn't work for me. i asked a number of the store assistants why they didn't have pots with drainage holes. the answer was the same each time, people are buying to house plastic plants in them. and then one of them recommended i visit this store called Pure; turned out Pure only sells plastic plants and flowers. something fell through and got lost in my world then. plants, animals, the diversity of life is what we hope will counter our 'civilization', but now people desire even their plants to be plastic! i ended up buying some books instead, one about restoring a garden. i came home and couldn't help searching for reasons why people bought plastic plants for their homes. in all the forums people kept saying its convenient and easy, you don't have to take care of them. Duh, well of course. not a single answer even dwelt on the plastic, on us replacing even the hope for this world. i have often felt like convenience is going to be the death of us someday. if people could eat and digest plastic, they would out of convenience cos after all plastic food wouldn't rot, it wouldn't turn yellow, get bugs, hell yeah we might not even need to excrete it. there's no life in it, so there is no risk of death. and now i am reading Olivia Laing, The garden against time, her memoir of yearning for, finding, and restoring a garden (with a house) with her husband 20-30 years older than her; i think it was their version of making a baby in this world before he dies.