Today’s calligraphy-inspired writing mulls on the Chinese word for abundance, and also on my relationship with my mother and how we communicate via plants - specifically her flowers. My mother is someone I never wanted to write about but is increasingly becoming a leitmotif. I am content to let my writing unfurl in this direction as it’s clearly reflective of whatever I am going through at this point in life.
Do you have experiences of gardening with your parents? What are your observations about the way they nurture plants and how it reflects on their nurture of you? Do leave a comment below.
My mother is a tender gardener,
more tender than she was as a mother.
Every girl has a memory of having their hair done by unfamiliar hands. The hands of a babysitting cousin, or perhaps the brusque schoolteacher. Maybe she remembers the unnatural way the updo sat on the head, its centre of gravity off its usual spot. Some strands too wispy, others pulled nauseatingly taut against the temples.
I only have one memory of my mother tying my hair. I think it must have been the maid’s day off. She scraped my ponytail off my face with an acuteness that made my eyes smart, not knowing how Begonia would first massage my thick hair with a paddle brush, then tenderly twist it into two long pigtails. Then, Begonia would secure them with the stretchy, fabric-coated bows that I favoured, not the spartan rubber band that my mother had grabbed that day.
How could familial hands be so unfamiliar?
Tenderly she plucks and pinches, deadheads.
A garden is tamed by familiar hands.
In our family home, albums overflow with one hundred trillion analogue photos of me as a child. Complete and utter assurance that I was surely once loved. Just now my phone chimes. I don’t have to look at it to know my mother has pinged one hundred trillion photos of her prized flowers into the family WhatsApp chat.
There was a point in time when my mother stopped taking photos of me, I can’t recall which year exactly. It may coincide with the point at which I learned to take my own photos, and - looking back now - in the self-absorbed manner of young adults, they are all of myself and my friends. There are hardly any snapshots of my parents. And I am quite sure this period coincides with the point at which my mother was determined to grow the most beautiful garden in our little suburban strip of terraced houses.
I could be green-eyed with jealousy at the attention my botanical siblings have received by her hands. But I am not. They are her children too.
“Feel the soil. Keep moist but not sitting in water.”
Our WhatsApp chat is strewn with unsolicited gardening tips.
I am a terrible gardener but I humour her, permit her to teach me. My mother’s messages are full of misdirected optimism. She checks in on my monstera (unruly, ugly), the pilea (languishing) and the virtually indestructible ferns (withered). I know she wishes for me to inherit her green fingers, just as she wishes for me to inherit broodiness. I inherited neither.
My plants are destined to die, regardless, but I cherish the paper trail of her tender missives. Her care of plants tell me how to care for myself. Every instruction is an imperative on the flow of irrigation, against the stagnation of energy.
I see why gardeners make the best philosophers.
My mother was my gardener,
now I help her tend her garden.
When I was younger I would prune my mind, pulling out deviant thoughts like errant tendrils. I wished to contain my whole being like a miniature pénjǐng; with the right training, I too could be contorted into an ornamental diorama. The model daughter, a perfect object of contemplation.
But my true nature is to be weed-like. Pruning à rebours only makes me flourish. And so I allow my thoughts to overgrow.
I kneel before her, a filial gesture. Nevertheless, I am kneeling to help her weed, not as a bride serving her elders in a Chinese tea ceremony. I wonder if she has given up hope on the latter. Her neck grows ever more crooked, like the coveted C-curve of a pénjǐng. I gently nag her to straighten up, but I do not wish to cultivate her.
We garden together, noiselessly contemplating a broken lineage of motherhood.
“A stunning poppy suddenly appears after a long time!”
She pings me excitedly one morning, with a photo of a violet opium poppy. It is an accidentally exquisite turn of phrase for my mother, who never wrote poems or read books. Who - in the manner of multilingual immigrants that are fluent thinkers but faltering speakers - must stumble over an assault course of grammatical traps while her brain whirs through a series of translations. Like a rotary combination lock clicking imperceptibly into place, she lands on a string of words whose tenselessness reveals a koan nature.
I like to think I was a stunning poppy for my mother. She once also did not believe she could be a gardener. In her fallowing years, the gods answered her prayers to deliver a healthy baby. And only now do I feel like I’m thriving, like those poppies that survive in the most unlikely of crevices - in cracks between concrete paving slabs or at the side of the motorway.
The most unexpected wildflowers are the most beautiful ones.
豐
The Chinese word for abundance is 豐 - fēng in Mandarin, fung1 in Cantonese. At the bottom of the word is radical 151 豆, a pot, and on top it is filled with flowers or crops.
Our parents only ever wish abundance for us. Sometimes, it seems like they are wishing abundance on us, in the manner of an unshakeable curse to write out ever larger numbers for the rest of our lives. Abundance looks like the eights of a number plate, the noughts on a paycheck, the family dining set that is arbitrarily defined as a four piece - as if anything smaller is also less.
But mostly, they wish for us to be happy.
When I think that I have failed all expectations, and even as my houseplants and ovaries dwindle, I hold on to another feeling of abundance. Not in the more-ness of things, but in the full-ness of things. Abundance, like the word 豐, is my mother’s garden, overfull with tender love and flowers.
This is beautiful and thoughtful writing. And reminds me of my mother and her green fingers. I was once told by a therapist to write a list of what my mother and father had each given me. Cooking and gardening skills came from my mother. It's a similarly complicated relationship. Thank you for writing and sharing.
I know of a like-minded group near you. Currently building a solar shower outside and contemplating how I can direct the run off from the guttering down the wall and onto flower beds to save on watering drought flooding and work