Wild Garden

We stop going up to the roof deck at the onset of the rainy season. It is where Aubrey goes to read her school books and where I sit to watch the sunset in the dry season. There are sleepless nights when we just sit on the park benches for an hour or two. And, on New Year's Eve, we have a perfect view of the city's fireworks from the iron staircase landing.

A month after the arrival of the rains I peek into the roof deck to see how human absence has transformed it. Potted plants have grown into trees and vines have crept not only up the iron trellises but across the tiled floor. Weeds have bloomed into miniature forests--they are not the weeds that one sees on the roadside or in fields but lush, healthy, blooming weeds that have grown to be legitimate garden plants in themselves. The fruit seeds that we casually dropped into garden soil in the past have begun to sprout. There are plants we cannot recall having ever planted and having ever seen, and we do not know what they are and where they came from.

The rain fairies and the gnomes take over the roof deck at this time of year, and they make it clear to us that their idea of gardening and landscaping is so much different from ours. There is beauty in this apparent chaos. It is herbal, Victorian clutter so exquisite that I dare not touch or change anything. It is a Neverland of leafy shelters, crawler bridges, mossy pathways, gardens within gardens, and puddle lagoons which I would not be surprised to see inhabited by tiny mermaids.

How joyfully and quickly Nature takes over a park, a garden, a plant box, or even a single pot, even in the overcrowded metropolis! All you have to do is leave Her alone.