Gardening on cement is a good idea.
My roof deck garden is, of course, cement, and I have there a wild tomato plant, a three-feet tall wild papaya, planted by the birds and the wind to get me, perhaps, to climb up the deck every morning and watch the sunrise and the frolicking mayas hop about, which I don’t get to do, oh, but for life’s constraints and numerous distractions.
There’s also a hugely spread-out thorny pineapple plant planted there by a previous help without my knowledge, like a thorny crown to the house (which I must move elsewhere for good feng shui reason). All of them are in clay pots.
Thanks to a friend for reminding me what a wonderful thing being a gardener is. And I must go back to growing plants again like in the Biñan, Laguna days many years ago, when I turned half the area of the place into a lush garden, mostly brambling ornamentals.
Except for an atis tree which grew the biggest, most luscious fruits and malunggay planted like sentinels by the gate, the blooming contingent were orchids, bromeliads, azaleas, jasmines, sampaguitas, petunias, constancias, periwinkles, yellow bells, lilies, zinnias and many more unnamed ones that brought to shore poetry written in that place.
I almost grew carnations, which were really a mite too fragile in those hot days in Luzon. Oh yes, there was native basil, too, from a mother plant found in the Palusapis farm that grew where the wind blew its feathery seeds everywhere in my garden. “I have to remove you here, and here, I beg your pardon, and here, and…”
Conversations
Every plant, every flower had a tale to tell. We talked to one another, carrying on conversations that drew the best imagined legends, and ended up in our collaboration of those wonder days I loosely call “flower poems.”
One day I will let you hear them and let you in on those stories. Aren’t they going to blush for all the secrets I will tell.
I woke up early on gardening days before the sun, foregoing our long morning walk to mull the prospects for breakfast-lunch because I wanted to be done with those and be able to run to the garden by daylight and stay out in the open sun for as long as I could, wearing my wide-brimmed hat and undistracted by the cares of day-to-day constraints.
The quiet rendezvous with my garden became, like solitude, a luxury in itself—until the mid-morning sun began to scorch my back and it was time to surrender the rest of our conversation for the day to the wind, the earth and the elements.
I am not sure why I didn’t grow the vegetables we ate. It would have been wonderful to eat what fruits of the earth one planted and harvested. It would have cured the maladies and malignancies of the day, real or imagined. But I did not. Just mostly flowers. Clustered gatherings of rainbows lighting up in adoration in the garden.
Whatever their hues and tones of colors, they played perfect notes of harmonies, set in the lush green grass that covered the ground. They did not quarrel among themselves.
And now with my cement garden up on the roof deck, who knows, maybe all overlooked gardening would be made possible. With the benevolence of the sun, wind and rain, even the stars and the moon become near in the distance that is fast becoming as illusory as life itself.