T he plants at our home never fail to amaze me. They can lie dormant for the longest time and then one fine day, change like magic. My rain lily plant did not flower for the past two years with only a bouquet of long and green ribbon-like leaves growing from it.
On the first morning of July, I woke up to a single white flower adorning its fresh green foliage with two buds surrounding it. A pristine and beautiful bloom with petals like the feathers of a swan. As a proud plant parent, I stood there gazing at it fondly, touching its soft petals, as the yellow pollen from its stamen sprinkled on my fingertips.
It was the first flower of the monsoon. I was pleasantly surprised. More so, as after a fertile spring, many of my plants breathed their last in the scorching summer.
It was painful to see them drying and drooping, changing colours from green to yellow to brown and then black as they embraced the brown damp soil of their pots. In the blink of an eye, my balcony turned from a plant paradise to a cemetery of plants and fallen blossoms. Needless to say, every time I stood on my balcony this summer, my mood resembled the state of my little garden, that of solemn despondence.
William Wordsworth’s “sprightly maiden”, the common daisy, a shy and lowly plant that I religiously sow every spring, meets a similar fate every season. I collect the seeds from my plants to sow them in the next season with a hope of regrowing new plantlets. Sometimes the seeds sprout, sometimes they .