By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

I MEAN, your garden, your personal planned space for the cultivation of plants including other forms of nature. What happens, after you’re gone?

At Teachers Village where our family stayed for more than ten years at an 800 square meters of vacant space, I had a garden full of various kinds of orchids. A huge narra tree provided some shade to plants that needed a cooler space. Most of the plants, including roses which my brother Rod cared for, were watered once a day, except for the orchids which required watering three times a day. The orchid collection started as a hobby and expanded as a business when sources of driftwood and gardening supplies came, and landscape designers started to buy in bulk. What gave me joy was not so much the business side of it, but the thrill of having to arrange flowers during weddings and special occasions, and in any ordinary day. There is excitement in creating bouquets.

All that stopped when I decided to study at Princeton because not one in the family volunteered to take over the responsibility of maintaining the garden in a new place, as our ten-year lease also expired. It was a painful decision to give the collection away to relatives and friends, consoled only with the hope that the plants will be given as much love as I have given them.

Now, I have developed a garden in an adjacent lot where all kinds of garbage and construction debris were dumped for years. There are seven mulberry trees, eight aratiles trees, a fire tree, three talisay trees, two bunches of bananas, calachuchi, gardenias, ilang-ilang, chinaberry, mangosteen, bougainvilleas, indigenous trees. People ask me, what happens to the garden when I leave, or when the owner of the adjacent lot decides to build on it?

What happens when I’m gone? That question is not as relevant to the fact that, at the present moment, the garden gives me joy, a place to contemplate, and is home to geckos, birds and insects that sing and fly at various times during the day. There are bees, fireflies, sunbirds, a bluebird, and a black bird. The black bird swipes at my peace at dawn, an impish distraction to my communion with the stars and the great space beyond.

Yesterday, I was invited by Girlie Villariba to rehabilitate a garden formerly cared for by a woman who lived until she was 104 years old. There is a greenhouse full of cattleyas, and the open space is surrounded by vandas and one dendrobium, attached to very old driftwoods, lined with kamuning shrubs. All the plants were shriveled in the heat, although I was told, they were watered once a day. Quite lucky for the garden to have survived, with one of her grandsons honoring her life by seeking ways to maintain the personal space his grandmother loved.

Gardens are very personal. They flow from the sanctum sanctorum, from a molecule inside us that combines pleasure and toil, hope and misery. They are desires, attempts to connect and explore the whole, the holy.

When you’re gone, may the garden be with you. May a particle remain with a child, or a grandchild. May it come back with rain.

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