From Hoarder to Nurturer, How Gardening helped Me Grow

I wasn’t born with a green thumb. I have killed more plants than Weiss and Benioff have killed the beloved Starks in ‘Game of Thrones’. I have been infamously called the Ted Bundy of horticulture. My long list of victims includes a bamboo bonsai, a cactus, and a succulent whose name I didn’t bother to find out. I didn’t murder them intentionally, of course. As a single, independent women living in a new city in her early twenties, I was too busy finding a boyfriend, nursing hangovers and stalking Brad Pitt online. I just happened to do what I saw a lot of people doing.

After the death toll rose to a double-digit number, I stopped buying plants and accepted my leaf-less existence the way one accepts one’s flat feet or freckles—without paying it any further attention whatsoever. Back then, I promptly skipped the Insta stories featuring garden herbs that my digital acquaintances were working on. When a friend told me excitedly that she had bought plants but no furniture for the flat she was to move in the next week, I rolled my eyes. Each time I read bios that had the words ‘plant papa’ in it, my brain cells shook in horror.

I have been infamously called the Ted Bundy of horticulture. My long list of victims includes a bamboo bonsai, a cactus, and a succulent whose name I didn’t bother to find out.

I was convinced gardening is dumb, and boring—a hobby for people with no social life, so to speak.  It’s 2022. I’m no longer single, in my twenties or a Brad Pitt stalker. I see my three friends once in three months. I don’t bar-hop, I get high on Ikea promotions. I also have a humble balcony garden. Undead. Thriving rather. Sometimes I sit and try to think how this transformation has come about. How did I go from plant-hopping to caring, nurturing them like my own?

It all began with an aloe-vera sapling that my mother-in-law pulled out of her well-pruned garden after hearing me complain about the useless anti-acne serums I had burned a sizeable chunk of my monthly salary on. Given my horrific past, my first reaction was to come clean and confess my crimes. I wanted to warn her that aloe’s blood would be on her hands. Not mine.

I remained quiet. The promise of acne-free skin was too tempting to pass. Selfish motive still, you could say.

Like maybe anti-ageing creams, long-massages, and the cumbersome act of saving old receipts, gardening, is one of those things that make sense only as you grow older.

Shockingly, Al grew tall despite all odds. It survived the menacing sun with little to no water week after week. It survived in a less than ideal home (a ceramic pot without drainage holes—my first rookie mistake), it survived the haunting gaze of Mowgli, my cat. Al was resilient and this resilience quite possibly began to rub off on me. Impressed by my plant’s tremendous fortitude, I brought home a modest four-inch basil. Then marigold. Followed by jade and mint. After a few failed attempts, I learned to propagate herbs with stem cuttings. Meanwhile, My Google search history indicated all signs of me turning into a crazy plant lady. I began sneaking out to nurseries on the pretext of picking up groceries. I spent a significant amount of my waking hours listening to random strangers on the Internet explain the difference between potting soil and potting mix. I had finally found something to give myself to, without the caveat of risking my health or emptying my pockets.

Like maybe anti-ageing creams, long-massages, and the cumbersome act of saving old receipts, gardening, is one of those things that make sense only as you grow older. It’s an experience situated outside the body and yet its therapeutic, humbling effects are almost all internal. There is the slowing down of heart rate as you mindfully water your greens, there is the dopamine released when you sight a butterfly humming around your desert rose. There is the quiet buzz of inhaling scented jasmine that doesn’t come out of a glass bottle. These are basic things really, but in the middle of hectic, systematised lives they have begun to represent for me an oasis of organic calmness. A relationship that only delivers more than it demands.

It’s clichéd, of course, but with nurturing little saplings of your own, it’s the journey. A journey that saved me in times of mental exhaustion.

Like all forms of therapy though, gardening takes time to grow on you. It’s not going to satisfy you like maybe the click of an app. Fancy Bonsais and plants look good in the background of your workplace, but in the real world they have to be nurtured, cared for. It’s this process that grounds you, maybe instils in you the patience that none of us have today. You can’t will a seed into germinating quickly. You can’t add a sapling to the cart and expect it to arrive at your doorstep in twenty minutes, fully bloomed. It’s clichéd, of course, but with nurturing little saplings of your own, it’s the journey. A journey that saved me in times of mental exhaustion.

Anisha thinks of her life as a Woody Allen movie that is yet to excel in Hollywood. When not writing ads, and consuming unholy amounts of sitcoms, Anisha likes to make playlists for the three friends she has.

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