City Nature – Alternative Roses, Gurgaon
Beauty without bloom.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
This is not the best season for roses. Not even at the rose garden in Gurgaon’s Sector 15A in the National Capital Region. And that’s why you ought to drop by this place. To learn to appreciate beauty long after its best days are over.
This sweltering afternoon the rose bushes are looking colourless, almost all seem stripped of their flowers. A careful examination reveals otherwise. The roses are not noticeable because most of them have shriveled up. Red, white, pink… all the shades have turned brown. Gardener Vishal, his face drenched with sweat, confesses he misses the colourful look the garden displays at other times of the year “but I feel more caring for the roses during this month.”
Holding a rose bud that has already dried out “perhaps because of such intense heat”, Vishal sits down by the hedge and compares roses to humans.
“We are not always healthy and good looking. Sometimes we enter a phase in life when our downfall starts but does that mean that then we don’t need love and support?”
Not all flowers are decaying. The hedges occasionally sparkle with brilliantly glowing roses, and those few look as out of place as healthy people roaming around in a hospital ward of the terminally ill. Vishal says that a new crop of rose will appear as soon as the long-awaited rains arrive. You must come then, he says.
But pay a visit to these flowers even if it doesn’t rain.
Their humbler state might touch your heart more deeply than a shiny red rose bouquet on sale in the neighbourhood mall.
Rose garden’s out of season sight
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