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.