Flowers

The gardens are not laid out; they’re not tidy, and they’re certainly not trimmed and manicured. The gardens are a random planting of trees, shrubs, climbers and crawlers. All the plants looked plonked in the ground, unplanned and liberally dowsed with a hosepipe from time to time. Any pruning is probably accidental and some of the placements are an affront to the eye, with small shrubs hiding behind bushes, and ramblers clinging to training wires that lead nowhere. Hedges are unkempt and grass lawns are criss-crossed with paths worn by anarchic feet that choose the easiest route. But there is growth and there is colour. Brilliant white, vivid scarlet and lush verdant green all screaming for the camera’s attention.

Birthday flowers

I was tidying my room (!) the other morning when I found a little vase full of dead flowers. I was inspired and strolled around the garden with my penknife choosing a selection of blooms and some sprigs of greenery. The little vase now sits on the verandah, but by the time I post this blog, the flowers will all need replacing – for my birthday on Monday. There is a different attitude to flowers as decoration here.

Every morning one of the girls of the staff walks around the gardens with a brass tray, picking flowers – but not the stems and leaves the way we would because people here don’t make flower arrangements as we know them: they strip of the individual petals and either make them into patterns, using the petals like mosaic tiles, or else they scatter them randomly around the shrines.

I think it’s their allegory of life. The flowers grow and bloom then wilt and die. These beautiful patterns of petals fade in hours and in a day or two there is just a mess to clear up and throw away. The Hindu attitude to life is that once the body has experienced this lifetime,  it’s discarded and burned. The important thing is to make time to enjoy the blooms and blossoms.