"This garden is no metaphor-"
Initially, I was drawn to gardening in part for its figurative potential. In the hour before dusk, just before my child arrived home from school, I entered the garden and saw portents, omens, and signs. Each message from the garden seemed to be a tarot card offered to me from the natural world. A sickly plant that had perked up was a symbol of depression clearing. A weed-infested morning glory? That life was overfilled and hopeless. If the limau purut plant was fruiting, I became convinced I was pregnant. Germinating lemon seeds augured a future of citrusy abundance and joy. I peered so intently at the garden, searching for harbingers of its health— what was it trying to say?— that it sometimes seemed like I was scrying my own.
I thrilled at resonances. An old journal entry reads: “In English, the “nursery” is both where seeds and babies are tended to. I cannot control my garden or nature in the same way I cannot control how my child will grow up. I am vexed and this vexation energizes me.” A part of me was always on the lookout for fortuitous coincidences in the natural world that could make a good story; something like: “The fiddle-leaf fig was being consumed by mealy bugs the day I fought with my husband.” Or: “The day we got a new car the hibiscus was in full bloom.” Singapore doesn’t have the four seasons, so there goes a whole range of melancholy autumn-related description of leaves falling off trees while This or That event happened. I cruised on reverberations between tending to a plot of land and finding the plot of a story I was trying to write. Plot and plot, get it?? I pottered around, questioning my every move, my tiny overactive mind creaking along.
Later, I castigated myself, feeling foolish. Why imbue the plants with so much symbolic potential? First-year literature majors learn about the pathetic fallacy: imbuing human emotion to inanimate subjects. The ferns are not smiling at me. They are being ferns. The foxgloves are not nodding their heads politely. The lemongrass doesn’t give a damn. The borage is indifferent. This tussle between the figurative and the real continues in other ways: I hold a rhizome in my hand and gain no insight into Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s post-structuralist concept of rhizomes as “multiple non-hierarchical networks of agencies.” I hold a rhizome and all semiotic associations fall away— a rhizome is a planty plant thing. Juicy, rooty, bug-like; tough.
I imbued the plants in my garden with too much meaning, or too little at all. “This garden is no metaphor—” claims the persona in Jane Hirschfield’s poem “November, Remembering Voltaire.” The garden is instead “more a task that swallows you into itself, / earth using, as always, everything it can.” Still, during the first few years since I took over the garden, hermeneutics continued enacting its little soothsaying dramas in the theater of my mind. Sometimes I forget how my formative years were spent within the linguistic and spiritual infrastructures of the church, and how, during that period, it was second nature for me to search for manifestations of the sacred and sublime in the secular world. That, plus a lifetime of reading prose and poetry where the natural environment is personified? Nature was omnipresent, and when personified; omniscient too. It was perhaps inevitable that since certain grand narratives had crumbled for me that I reached for something larger than myself.
Time passed. Plants lived and died, and so did these vexing insights that had energized me. I tried my best to keep them alive, both my plants and fickle theories, then gradually learned to throw them out when their capacity for vitality expired. I look back on all my little garden-related epiphanies and find them lacking. Being a gardener has taught me nothing. It is not a replacement for the sacred. Still, I am besotted with insights. I love a Good Message, a compelling epiphany. Something neat, succinct, pedagogic: “Gardening has taught me patience, gardening has taught me to let go. Being a gardener, I learnt attentiveness.”
As much as I’d like to say I waltz into the garden with a cheerful heart, often I storm out of the study filled with a crippling anxiety— what am I trying to say? Why can’t I say it properly? Why are the words I use always the wrong ones? How do I begin to sort out the confused murmurings in my mind into something that remotely evokes even the slightest semblance of order?— I stuff my fists into my gardening gloves, feeling foolish and ineffectual. I roughly grab a root-bound plant by the stem and begin to vindictively pry it loose from the pot that has become too small for its strong, thickened roots. Often, this involves wrestling with the plastic nursery pot, massaging it, and trying to shimmy the firmly encased plant out. The goal is single-minded, rodent-like: get it out. Get. It Out. Getitoutgetitoutgetit— Most of the time this succeeds: the rootball pops out of its previous home, this feat announced by an impressive spray of dirt that arcs above the liberated roots and lands on my aghast face. As I pack the denuded plant into a new, more spacious plastic home, the new room their pinched feet have breathes a little space into the clench in my chest. And the familiar drugging sense of self-forgetfulness washes over in the rhythm of pruning, digging, and clipping. Words lose their false importance. “A garden,” as Rebecca Solnit reminds in her book Orwell’s Roses, “offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.”
Still, I am wary of uncritically extolling the virtues of gardens and gardening, especially in a country where the proud moniker Garden City is riddled with capitalist logic and ecological injustices; where the actualization of this idea of a ‘Garden City’ involves a high carbon footprint and the destruction of ecosystems in neighbouring countries like Cambodia during sand extraction for Singapore’s reclaimed land. Where indigenous plants have been uprooted in the name of development and are now critically endangered. Where stewardship is always too late. Sometimes I look around my garden and wonder how many of the plants I have were unwittingly bought with no thought to their horticultural history or place of origin. Is it possible to decolonialize a Singapore garden? In the opening line of Shawn Hoo’s astonishing poetry collection Of The Florids, the persona muses: “Of the myths this city boy believes in: nature / poems don’t exist.” The poet is preoccupied with the difficulty of speaking of the natural world in Singapore’s airtight urban composition; how a tropical island retains the tropics while forgetting its islandness, where rewilding and regrowing are ironic, desperate attempts to greenwash the destruction of the island’s few remaining natural environments.
Now that I tend to a garden, I am more aware of the control being wielded, the dispassionate manicuring. The gardener’s regime of control and submission is present in Leong Liew Geok’s poem on the subject, in which a gardener talks sternly to his plants: “Be grateful, Hibiscus, you haven’t been disowned;/ And listen to a final warning: behave — and bloom!” Behave, I scold my plants. Look sharp! I threaten them with my tools of enforcement: fungicide, neem oil, the dreaded garden shears. Get into shape! I deport the unwanted immigrants taking up space. Caterpillars? Out! Beetles? Out! Mealy bugs? Out, out, out! I entice the plants that curry my favour with compost tea and fertilizer. I punish those that displease me by refusing to feed or nourish them. Bloom, I demand. Leaves, be green. I have never intentionally killed creatures until I began this project of the garden. Now I am a unsentimental arbiter of fates; you there, stay. You there, perish. I will nurse or abandon you. Please me or suffer. I am an immigration officer stinking of rot and compost, conferring citizenship according to my own standards of beauty, space, and how much care I think can spare. I once yanked off a mature caterpillar getting fat on the leaves of my monstera so firmly its entire torso exploded quite suddenly in my hands.
If I had to say anything about gardening at all, it would perhaps be that cultivating a garden calls upon a certain watchfulness animated by inventories of equal parts hope and resignation. Hope that if I continue pottering away, making the tiny decisions that make up a thousand little acts of care, something might happen. Or it might not. That every determination to prune, clip, sow, or discard may one day make something of beauty. Or it might not. Kill your darlings, scythe through them. Not all efforts bear fruit and that’s okay. I excised two hundred pages of writing, ones I put months of work into, day after day of sitting at my desk, and am learning this might not be time lost but time gained. Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li writes, “All things in the garden, just as in life, are provisional and impermanent. One gardens with the same unblinded hope and the same willingness to concede as one lives, always ready to say, If not now, later; if not this year, next year.”
I put off planting a tree for a long time. In the end, I decided on a sea hibiscus, which had outgrown my largest pot, its roots reaching into the earth beneath it. It had just rained, the soil yielded easily and I dug a deep hole with my humble little blue shovel. And there— I planted it. And there was neither glorious delusion nor disappointing defeat; I shook off the dirt from my gloves and turned my mind away, readying myself to watch what would happen.
This new watchfulness and transformed perception of time had some associative connective tissue with being a parent and bringing forth a new generation, and also with returning to a country and childhood home close to a decade after abandoning them. While on vacation abroad during the past few years, I visited the botanical gardens and municipal parks of other cities, expecting a new enthusiasm on my part to appreciate them since I had now become ‘a gardener.’ But apart from an ambivalent academic curiosity and general enjoyment of the climate and weather, many of these gardens left me cold. So I suppose something else I could say about becoming a gardener is that I realized that I didn’t have a sudden fervour for plants because of a burgeoning interest in the myriad wonders of nature or because plant biology was inherently amazing— but because I saw in the garden I inherited a way of finding my way home. Caring for the plants in my garden came to me to symbolize things I could not abandon but inevitably would. A thousand times I would. And now, a thousand times I would try to salvage them.
“One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in,” reminds French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his study on the poetics of space. Despite this I cannot shake the nagging feeling that nurturing a garden in order to make a home is a misguided attempt at preserving some sort of longevity with something laughably transient. Two days of inattention and too-hot weather? Wither, wrinkle, desiccate, ruin! A week of depression, finding it physically difficult to go back and forth between the tap and the watering can? The leaves turn sad and shriveled, aerial roots pop out from stress, stems transform from juicy green to sickly brown. This inattention has consequences; these deformities and their haphazard supporting infrastructure become surreal botanical sculptures that happen to populate my living space. How dare they have the temerity to carry on living, despite having exhausted their capacity for beauty? You mean I have to continue watching over these crumpled, stooped spectres with their pest-eaten leaves? Have to live with these visual reminders of my lapses of care, my negligence and inadequacy?
Sometimes when I am hunched over pots and plucking snails off leaves, a creeping, sticky unease steals over me and seizes my heart; a dreadful doubt that gardening would make me more rootbound by staking me tighter within the confines of the house. I imagine myself as an old woman, still doddering around the same plot of land, content and narrow-minded, shorn of thrill and excitement. Isn’t there something wrong — that I’d prefer playing by myself in the dirt to going to a party with good food and new people? Tending to a garden has a sticky permanence, a fixedness in space that I struggled with, especially after we made the decision to move back to Singapore after so many years. Houses can be shut up, furniture put into storage, books squeezed into packing boxes as people relocate, become restless starry-eyed nomads, see the world. But a garden stays. I repeat: a garden stays. And so must its gardener.
The garden is a stake in home-making and the future, but caring for it also leads me deep into remembrance of the past. Most gardens are palimpsests of previous gardens. Behind the current incarnation of my garden is the ghost of my mother’s. My memory is leaky, faulty; the usual result of having taken something for granted in childhood. I can’t remember much except the most obvious: the water features, the heliconias. But now that I have become the garden’s janitor, warden, and mistress, I want to know: how tall had my mother’s snake plants been? Where had she bought her lotuses from, which nursery had the Hanuman statue with water spouting from its mouth travelled from? I uncover stories of my mother’s garden from relatives and neighbors and pore over old photos of the house that featured the garden. This exercise is one of futility: the photos often foreground people: my sister and I as children, or my father reading the newspaper. Glimpses of the garden were in the margins, some greenery or hanging trellis making an accidental appearence in the background.
The Hanuman has vanished. The lotus flowers? Who can tell? There are only a few reminders of the dream of a garden past; most of them given back to me by women who, though they wouldn’t wax poetic about their gardens the way I would mine, understand deeply the cyclicality of gardens and home-making: an aunt who sawed off a branch of a large dragon tree in her home and quietly propagated it for months in a large pot before she arranged for it to be transported to me said nonchalantly, “Here. This tree first came from Limau Purut. Now I’m giving it back.” Or a neighbour who enlisted the aid of her husband to saw off branches of the frangipani trees at the front of their house and passed them to me because “your mum first gave them to us. Now I give them to you. We’ve come full circle, haven’t we?”
When I look at these gifts that have travelled back to the garden they first grew in: the lobster claw heliconias, the parrot beaks, the boston ferns, the rabbit foot; I dream of my mother and the garden she had. Sometimes when I dig my hands deep into the dirt, the gap between the two closes. When this happens, I welcome her ghost. She never speaks, her illusive presence hovers as I potter around and landscape the domain that used to be hers. Often I forget about her entirely. Audiobook narrators have me clutching a fragile seedling too tightly as they race me along the edge of a tension-drenched narrative precipice, and funny podcasters make me snicker and spill lime sulphur all over myself. Still, during that waning hour, I feel close to my increasingly fuzzy memory of her. We might work in silence, she and I, or stride through the length of the yard together, hyper-vigilant for signs that the plants in our garden are ailing or flourishing.
Walk, stop, peer, squat. No design, just flow. Here it is, a fern growing in a crevice in the wall. How did the chi chi plant get here? How wild and improbable this method of seed dispersal. What’s this? Stinks, that. What a strange vine, see this unfamiliar moss. A forgotten Rangoon creeper I had given up on and forgotten for months revives, clusters of pink and burgundy tubular flowers exploding into tiny bloom one morning, reminding its distracted keeper of its surprising resilience. Too leggy here. Fucking weeds! Bit rusty, the shears. “some funky fungi growing,” I type into my phone. Mysterious scat: civet cats? The frivolous powder puff plant self-seeds, and now its dark, metallic green leaves unfold in pots not its own. Rained yesterday. Am I out of fertilizer? Oops, sliced the earthworm in half. Jasmine’s bloomed. Evade the buzzing bumblebee! Is the hour up? Need a shower. Overgrown and diseased, bedraggled and unruly. Sunny today. Let’s begin again.
Often the hour ends with mud on my clothes, my face, my hair. Dirt gets in between my fingernails, gets smeared on my thighs. It feels honorable in some strange way— I translate it into time spent nurturing, paying attention to, and throwing my effort into a whim that might bloom into something else. For that’s what all these are— whims. My garden is less a curated botanical resume than a slapdash museum of each fleeting curiosity. Some days I look around at all the dirt I have dragged around me, history of the mess I have made with what I have been given, and am filled with guilt and despair. On other days the leaves and flowers and their stubborn vitality infect me with the blooming fullness of life: wow, look at that bougainvillea bloom! Whoa, look at how hardy this ginger is, this monstrous pandan! The dirt smeared on my hands and chest are like a measure of the care I have put into something, so as the days and weeks pass, and the months turn to years as I strive to see the beauty of where I am planted and struggle to make art in my life, it feels like maybe, just maybe, I am crafting out an artful life nonetheless.