HELLO JI!

A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR

Image credit: SNAPWIRE from Pexels.

Our younger son was telling my friend and gardening guru that he wanted a tree house in “his” apple tree. He was around five at the time and we had just planted out first tree in Canada. Dorothy patted his head over the fence and said, “Don’t forget to invite me over for tea in your tree house!”

As he scampered away to get the watering can, she smiled. It would be his children who would play in that tree house, she said.

When we moved to another house some years later, I first wondered if it was worth my time to plant more trees. They’ll take years to grow and yield a harvest, I thought, and then I remembered what Dorothy had said.

If not our sons or their children, someone’s kids would play under that tree, maybe hang a swing from its branches, or watch birds build nests and feed their young ones. Someone would lounge in the shade of that tree and read a book on a summer afternoon.

I was also reminded of the beautiful old trees that grow on the large property where Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island. Preserved for the millions of tourists that troop there to pay homage to the creator of the beloved Anne of Green Gables, a plaque on one tree has these words by her: “I am  grateful that my childhood was spent in a spot where there were many trees. When I have lived with a tree for many years it seems to me like a beloved human companion.”

And so we planted not one, but three saplings. A magnolia, an apple and a cherry. We are yet to get cherries – the few that appear are carried away by squirrels – the apple is still too young to give us more than a few small fruits but the magnolia, though still nowhere near the majestic heights it will eventually reach, rewards us with beautiful flowers each spring.

Oh, and we also rescued a crabapple tree that was growing by the fence, the seed thrown there by a bird or a squirrel no doubt. Choked by the Virginia creeper that spreads ten or more feet each year, it was a spindly little thing, struggling to come up for air. We cleared the creeper around it and voila! in a year or two, it has shot up and has the most gorgeous cloud of deep pink blossoms come spring.

According to a Greek proverb, a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

So yes, as the quote on a poster at a garden centre said, The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

Because in these uncertain times, when a virus can threaten our lives, our way of life and dampen our sense of optimism, wise Cicero’s words remind us that a farmer “plants trees for the use of another age”. See book review on page 26. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

Happy Easter!

Baisakhi ki badhai!

Happy Earth Day!

Ramzan mubarak!

SHAGORIKA EASWAR