The Garden

the best part about my apartment is without a doubt the garden that Georgette, the landlord, has planted. when you enter the gates of the house (she lives in the giant 2 story stone house, and we live in this back cottage sort of apartment), there's about 5 or 6 big rose plants, a jasmine tree,  a giant lavendar bush, another night jasmine tree, and other plants which fill up the spaces in between whose names i dont know.  circling around the back, directly behind our bedroom windows, is a patch of garden with fresh Zataar, tea herbs, mint, different flowers (like those giant giant lilies), and more things which i dont know the names of.  and in the main garden that we look out to whenever we sit in the back, is a giant almond tree, a handful of big lemon trees, some fruit trees, and several rose bushes  I feel like the richness of the garden alone is the thing that makes me feel like i live in luxury.  everything in the garden and our lives parallel to it living in this stone old fashioned house/cottage has a kind of co-existance that I'm not entirely familiar with.  The appreciation and love for it is something that I hadn't known or learned before. My mom back home is famous for her gardening skills, and she grows a wide number of vegetables.  She has to tend to the dirt, buying bags and bags of fertilizer and mulch to make the ground 'healthy' enough for her patches of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and a like five different types of chilli plants, eggplants and different kinds of spinach and herbs to grow. its funny how much money you have to dump on the ground to get 'natural' things to come out.

Here, stuff just grows.  not just grows, but grows in a way that i'm just not used to, and in a way that is almost enchanting.  sitting outside in our small outside patio place, the serenity that you feel is so soothing, it makes everyone fall in love with this place.  Sometimes I feel pampered.  When I go to work every morning, I have to brush my hands against the lavender to get a nice whiff of it to start my morning. the jasmines have been in full bloom for the past couple of weeks, and those tiny flowers have the biggest sweetest aroma that is just too lovely.  i walk to school, with a couple of jasmine flowers, and i just cant stop smelling them.

i was walking to school the other day with my roommate T and i had a couple of jasmine flowers in hand, and i asked 'call me crazy but i really dont think flowers in the States smell this good'.  she looked at me and said "you're going to miss this place a lot when you leave.  you should remember every step that you take up this hill to work every morning so that when you close your eyes back home, you can be back here again".

Is it bad that the first time M and I were walking around the garden trying to figure out what all the plants and trees were, I had no idea what these things looked like in real life.  For instance, when I think lavender, I either think light purple or I think one of those highly overpriced small aromatherapy bottles in  Bath and Body Works, that's supposed to make me sleep better or something.  So when I saw the lavender stems for the first time, long dusty green stems with small rigid leaves with vertical flower buds at the very tip of them, I had no idea that you had to brush your hands against the stem to get the seeping aroma from the leaves onto your hands.  In fact if I had seen this lavender bush in passing, I would have thought it was weeds and shrubs or something and wouldn't have even bothered trying to smell them.

  When the roses would come in full bloom, I would think about how much a collection of those would cost in the States, and I would feel pampered knowing that the flowers came out of OUR garden for FREE.  giant blooming roses, of all colors, lavender, yellow, red, yellow with orange tipped petals, peach with bright pink tips,  birght vivacious pink and pure white, all of them grow in our garden.  There would hardly ever be day when M and I didn't have a 'bouquet' of flowers in each of our bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen table.

and so many times I would think to my self that all of the worlds problems, all of the solutions to these problems can be found inside one of these beautiful flower petals.  I wish I could explain what I mean by that. But when you are surrounded by a peaceful serenity of the natural gifts of nature and you see the inimitable perfection that it is and how comforting it is for you, you as a person also being a gift of nature, every problem that is man made seems ludicrous and foolish.