My Creepy wild forest ...Part 2

My Creepy wild forest is getting dense.

There are two butterflies , a pigeon and plenty of honey bees who now have a visitors visa to the little forest.  I would have given them a permanent residency, but for amma who believes that honey bees can be dangerous if they decide to make their home in our creepy wild forest.

In the good old days ( which was not so very long ago) when the house sparrows were a common bird. If human kind had not put them on the extinction map i am sure we would have had them chirping around in our creepy little forest.

The last time I spotted one was outside the Uffizi  gallery in Florence.

 Instinctively I reached out for my camera and clicked them.

In the early eighties when Pune was still Poona, we lived there in what was then a suburb surrounded by streams, villages, mountains and a  faraway aerodrome where one Indian airlines plane landed once a day.   

 In the cold winter days two house sparrows would somehow manage to get inside the house through the ventilator and sleep in the corner of our wardrobe loft cuddling each other.     

We christened them Simpoo and Dimpoo.  They were a part of the family and shared the bedroom with the rest of us.

House sparrows were a common sight and no one in our wild imaginations would have thought they would be relegated to the ‘exotic’ status like a parrot or a peacock . This was not very long ago. We are only talking 1980’s and 1990’s.

Who would have thought they would get endangered and extinct in our lifetimes ?

Anyway coming back to my creepy wild forest, we are having a fantastic harvest of Jathimalli.

If you are regular reader of my blog you know my obsession with fragrant flowers. 

Creepy little forest is currently home to a strain of Thanjavur Mullai and Madurai Malli , two other varieties for fragrant flowers . They flowered briefly a couple of months ago and have since then taken a sabbatical.

For now Jathimalli flowering in the garden is a joy to behold.  I plucked a day’s  harvest sometime back and strung them into a mala. 

Every day, I spend time in the creepy little forest, closely watching over the progress that the creepers and plants are making, giving them a support or charting out a growth trajectory for the ones gone wayward, while I sip my morning cup of tea. 

I like my tea nicely spiced up.  It would normally be a generous piece  of crushed ginger or a splash of cardamom. Ginger and cardamom have now been replaced by Tulsi or Mint or Ajwain leaves.

Freshly picked  from the creepy wild forest. 

Ah ... the little joys of seeing your plants flourish, seeing some of them struggle against a heavy downpour,   watching them stand up and move on in a few days, seeing them flower , off late seeing them infested with monsoon pests and insects and sometimes seeing them just wither away.

It is a pleasure and pain watching and experiencing  their lifecycles unfold day in and day out.

Gardening is indeed a great stress reliever, is addictive, gratifying and a profound learning experience.