The Battle for Flowers

We live in a property that we do not own - provided by my employer - for two years now. We accordingly inherited a garden in that property that was in a bad shape (not aware if it was negligence of previous tenants or it was due to a long gap of unoccupied space). The employer doesn’t provide any resources for gardening, which happens to be an interest of our family. So we set out and bought new plants, pots, soils and got the garden in order using some help from local labour and other times toiling on our own. The soil is overladen with termites and rocks, hence very difficult to invest in new plants. Illogical to spend on new soil because the monsoon here wipes the topsoil off in a few spells itself! We still did try to bad luck. Some bananas have managed to catch on ????.

During the non-monsoon spells the garden needs watering. We are lucky to have inherited some good hibiscus trees and a small jasmine bush. One hibiscus near the gate is a lovely peach/red combo while the others are red, and one is pink. Two of those have since given up flowering - a red and a pink one. The one near the gate continues to provide flowers erratically; some days going completely silent. We use the flowers from the garden to offer to our Gods in the morning. On days when there is poor flowering we end up having a meagre offering of one or two flowers. To compound this natural problem we somehere also figured out a human hand lurking in the bushes (literally). There were two “gentle”men who flowered from nowhere at different points in time and during their morning walk/cycle they would pluck buds and flowers from the hibiscus tree near the gate (H1 from now on).

One of these men, say T1,? was oldish and came on a cycle which he would park at the crossroad, walk to our house and pluck whatever buds from H1 that he could reach. Hmm - what this meant was that we would miss all of those potential flowers the next day. This went on for some time and then in between this other guy, T2, blossomed into the scene with a bad scent. A couple of times T2 and I have had eye to eye staring contest when he tried to sneak to H1 while I was watering in that area and he walked off as if nothing happened. I feel its difficult to confront, since he has not walked into the garden but rather pulls at the branches to get the flowers from the outside. This is in stark comparison to T0, who actually walked into the garden when my wife and I were having our tea, to pluck some flowers. Later we had to confront him and tell him it was not ok. He apparently was having mental health issues. In any case after that he disappeared from the story. Back to T2…

He now has become a permanent fixture in our storyline. Many a times it became an urge to beat him to the flowers in the morning. Figuring out a rough time that he would come was not easy since we had our work to do - kids and me off to school/college. Recently I got tempted to get a security camera as an experiment to try and capture him in the act or at least keep an eye on modus operandi. With this we were able to capture T2 in all his glorious rough acts of pulling branches and pluck flowers at will from outside. Many times he would pull branches of the inside parts to get at a flower that otherwise we would have used for our Gods. Over time we felt the tree also had got bent towards the outside possibly due to this constant pulling outward.

[T2 in action here. You can see him pulling inside branches in the first half - see how the entire tree is ruffled: please see link in the comment]

In frustration of handling this situation one day we decided to trim the tree quit a bit especially the outside parts. We avoided doing it initially since there were always buds present on the branches are we felt it was not correct to do so. But we reached a point where this seemed like a way to control T2. So one fine weekend we trimmed a lot of branches without impacting the tree. However T2 continued to pull and get to his choice of inside flowers.

At times it feels like this is a battle with my/our ego(es). This tree was not ours to begin with. It was already there planted by some nice tenant who nourished it to this state. Yes, we are helping nourish it and tending to it - watering it, but do we ‘own’ it? We also thought at times that T2 may be using our flowers for his God, so in any case these flowers were being used for a God. But that was fleeting and we could not let go based on that. Can we confront T2 and tell him to stop picking on this tree since it is ‘our’ tree. He can claim that he is not entering and picking from ‘our’ property. In parallel I also pick some lovely red hibiscus flowers from our kind neighbours’ house because the branches are into our garden. At an opportune time I did inform the neighbour of me taking a few flowers. Also they did not appear to pluck any flowers for their use in any case.

One time I even thought of completely surprising him - by plucking flowers early and keeping some for him! Would that embarrass him, and stop this. Other time I thought maybe printing the photo of him doing this and pasting it on the wall might push the same reaction and outcome. I would so much like to let this go and not let ego come more strongly in by putting in some more obstacles for T2 to reach these flowers, maybe possibly damaging the tree in the process. But the human nature makes it so difficult to let go! WIP!!