The mystical beauty of flowers

My sighting of the first Oleander of the season. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

I returned to the rain-drenched, cloud-immersed Alpine landscape of South Tyrol on Monday, having taken the early morning train from Venice. When I got to my writing room I gasped at the sight of one Orchid in full bloom. The plant was a wedding gift from the restaurant where we hosted lunch after the Nuptials. It had one long stalk with gorgeous white blooms, with a yellow smudge around the core of each.

It was only in February that the plant was finally bereft. In this new form, the orchid seemed uncanny to behold. I had come to perceive the white, waxy, labial flowers as a kind of still life. Mid-December they had begun to wither, one by one, at first drying up, then falling into the wrought-iron basket that holds the container with the snaky roots. I grew apprehensive. I felt like the plant was now entrusting me with its existence.

I had been relying on my mother-in-law's wisdom with orchids. Since this was a gift made to us, she insisted I keep it in my workroom. It was ‘ours'. Though, since I primarily inhabited this room, since it contains my work table, the plant was ‘mine' to care for, a fact that represented something mysteriously new about belonging, especially in the dislocated present, when I ‘own' next to nothing.

Nervous, at the time I asked my partner what strategy of nourishment I should be adopting, given my lack of experience with this particular category of botanical life. He said, ‘Every day a little sip.' Because we conduct our relationship bi-lingually, he being a native German speaker, while I think and dream in English, the words we use tend often to have a resonance beyond the register of our everyday mundane. When he said ‘sip', I was standing beside our/my orchid and experienced the digestive visuality of the word. When you drip the ‘sip' into the roots, you suddenly witness it being absorbed. The excess is drained immediately. This is the level of exacting carefulness that needed to be exercised. That was all there was to it.

Since then, I have been watching the orchid grow. I've been monitoring every slight change, the suggestion of a new leaf whorl, the possibility of a protrusion from a stem, curly roots with their alluring green until I could no longer keep track, until the plant seemed possessed with life force and I lifted one long leaf to discover a whole steam formation, until buds began to form. First two, then four, then, suddenly, after a week of absence, ten, while the new tendrils also marched onward to produce what appears like the suggestion of buds, guaranteeing a rich flowering life that'll tide me through the next few months.

When I exited the vaccine centre in Meran, I was smitten by a pomegranate tree in full bloom, the vermilion blossoms dancing in the wind. A week ago, before I left Venice, I had also found the lavender finally in bloom. This morning I saw the first Oleander flower and for the first time sighted the pink-hued blooms that would turn into rosehip. This did, indeed, feel like a revelation.

As I journey back and forth between Venice and Tramin, what strikes me most is the lack of foliage in Venice. There are many lovely gardens, but they are mostly behind walls, cloistered, secluded. And I wonder if the omnipresence of flowers in South Tyrol owes something to the fact that it is inhabited by the people to whom it belongs, unlike Venice, where large-scale tourism has driven most locals out of their homes.

I keep my eyes out in Venice. I look between the tattered parts of fences for better glimpses of what lies hidden from tourist eyes. Someone has kept for me a book called, ‘The Gardens of Venice', while someone else has mapped for me two gardens in cloisters where I must knock on the door and hope someone answers.

Meanwhile, in Tramin, I bump into neighbours trimming their lawns, snipping off extra leaves, planting new seasonal varieties. Yesterday, I met someone I had met in Venice at the beginning of May, a local Traminer, a friend of my father-in-law's cousin. She was gardening in the shared patch across from her house, near Sankt Jakob Kirche, where we were married. She said they loved to put on a display for the pleasure of passers-by. I loved this element of pride. I never imagined myself as someone who'd go on and on about flowers, but there's something indeed mystical about witnessing the abundance with which they come into life, and the hectic activity that surrounds them. I wish more people cared about gardens. I wish this beauty mattered much more to many more.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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