Wild, yet Beautiful!

Dear friends, family, and followers of the blog:

A warm hello to you all from The Vibgyor Chronicles! I hope you all had a fabulous new year celebration and are already working on your resolutions. Most of you would have celebrated holi and settled into spring, bidding goodbye to winters.
My life, meanwhile, has taken a new direction, and with the addition of a tiny new person, I’m finding myself and learning to be a new person all over again.

Currently residing at the paternal homestead for post-partum recuperation, I am enamoured by the land and garden surrounding the old British bungalow assigned to my father by the University. A garden this size, no doubt, has innumerable possibilities and opportunities to engage one’s green thumb; but it also comes with many practical problems that us city dwelling balcony and container gardeners are unaware of.

One of the major (and perennial) issues is that of weeds. They are diverse, they are relentless and they are everywhere. Weeding has to be a weekly activity otherwise you run the risk of having your garden run-over by them. Even then, you’ll never be completely free of them. While observing the multiple varieties of unwanted grass and weeds here, I found some of them quite beautiful. Lovely small and bright flowers, intricate seed heads and some of them, while being weeds or growing wild among other crops, are even useful as separate crops themselves!

This post is an ode to some of these wild things that bring colour and beauty along with chaos to an organised garden.

All pictures © The Vibgyor Chronicles
Please click on the first image to enlarge and then scroll.

The beautiful six petalled arrangement of leaves is akin to that of a flower

Pretty pretty wispy lilac flowers

Looks like a miniature sunflower

Barely a cm in diameter, these flowers have detailed pink centre

Tiny royal flower, on a kind of grass

Seems to belong to the corn family with its tiny white flowers

The seed pod – looks like a tiny corn cob

Tiny, ant-sized yellow flowers, look similar to mustard

Small yellow flowers, look similar to mustard flowers

The gauzy white material is actually seeds, ready to be blown away by winds for dispersal

A wild fern growing in the crack on a cement sitting bench in the garden

Beautiful magenta flowers

Tiny berries, like green and black pearls hanging from the small plant

Cannabis – also known as Marijuana or Bhaang

Cannabis flowers close up

Seed pods

Vinca Rosa, aka Sadabahar, growing as a weed in the Brinjal patch on its own

Rounded lush green leaves and perfect five petalled bright yellow flowers, one cm in diameter

Some of them are pretty (or useful) enough to be grown properly! I, for one, won’t mind growing more of the tiny blue and yellow flowers. These plants definitely make the garden more interesting even if they’re unwanted guests in fields or patches belonging to other, more desirable, plants.
Wilderness has a rugged beauty of its own. While we all love an organised garden; sometimes, in the untamed spread of wild plants, immeasurable natural beauty and solace can be found 🙂

We will meet again, very soon. Until then, take care, and keep gardening 🙂