Weeknote 000 - A Garden While Time Happens

What happened?

• The weather has gotten quite ridiculously HOT.
• R normally loves to take a walk in our cul-de-sac more than she likes to hang out in the lawn or even in the playhouse, so we are quite frequently walking back and forth along the street. I'd been hearing a koyel at the start of the cul-de-sac for the past few weeks, but it has slowly gotten nearer and nearer to our house this past week or so, to the point that I hear it consistently all day from our window now. It's the loveliest sound ever, and I'm glad it's moved so close to us as our walks have gotten less frequent in this heat.
• Launched the new design for this website on Monday. And not surprisingly, right after I had deployed it, I wanted to start making design changes. But I'll hold off on the impulse for as long as I can, as this redesign itself was the result of procrastinating on some work that has been long overdue.
• I had anticipated this to be a slow week owing to a mid-week public holiday, but it turned out to be quite exhausting because of it. R woke up on Tuesday insisting to meet her grandparents – not just speak on the phone, but to go to their house. Around 5pm I reminded hydr that it was a holiday tomorrow, that my parents were hosting a dinner party at their house to which we had been invited AND that R has been insisting since morning to meet them, and asked him if he was up for a quick trip to Islamabad. 45 minutes later, all three of us were packed and on our way.
• We took this opportunity to surprise both sets of grandparents. Hydr's parents are visiting the country and were at their Islamabad residence after having spent a few weeks here with us in Lahore, so we surprised them on Tuesday night. And then on Wednesday evening, we did the same with my parents. Both sets absolutely overjoyed at R's unexpected drop-in; their reactions made the impulsive trip decision so worth it.
• We had a nice lunch at Fuoco's on Wednesday afternoon, which is one of the few restaurants that I know of that serves gnocchi (in Lahore and Islamabad), and so I try to sneak in a stop when and if I can when in Islamabad, which is of course very rare.
• The dinner my parents were hosting turned out to be a bigger affair than I had anticipated. My mothers side of the family is huge, and six of her siblings were gathered at the dinner along with offspring, spouses of offspring, and grand-offspring, so I would imagine there were at least 60+ adults in the house along with many many toddlers and infants. They had hired catering help, but as it inevitably is with such large gatherings, we ended up having to run around quite a bit so it was more tiring than what we had bargained for.
• We were supposed to leave back for Lahore early morning on Thursday, mainly to avoid the mid-day sun, but we were so tired from the drive to Islamabad and then dinner the previous night (my parents house is a 50 minute drive from hydr's parents house), that we ended up sleeping in. We left the city around noon, which is the exact time that we wanted to avoid being out on the road on, but thankfully the weather on the way back to Lahore was not that bad.
• By Thursday evening, while browsing for options for a summer camp for R, mainly to get her school-ready, I had a sudden realization that schools were now out for the summer and that we had not yet toured a single school and that we would not get to see any real action now and that we were probably already quite late to this whole process of selecting a school for R and getting her enrolled. And so: PANIC! I started calling up friends with kids in early years to get a sense of what options we had to choose from, as well as lots and lots of google searches and of course long conversations with ChatGPT about it late into the nights all weekend. We got some very good feedback from our friends, but many of them were very conflicting opinions too so we realized we had to figure out what mattered most to us instead of relying solely on advice from friends. I am so pissed at myself at having missed the opportunity to sit through live classes, and frankly I'm terrified that we won't know what it's like in reality until we have officially enrolled R into a school, but it is what it is now. Anyway, the weekend was pretty much about shortlisting schools that we will be visiting next week. There will be definitely more thoughts on this matter next week.
• I had back-to-back visits to the same site, first on Friday morning and then again on Saturday afternoon for a followup. Hate having to work on Saturdays, but didn't want to push this visit to next week either so just went through with it. Thankfully the site's only a 5 minute drive away.
• Hydr and I snuck in a quick dinner date on Saturday evening after dropping R back off home from a story-time session at The Last Word. We were both craving steak, and so we ended up at Aylanto after ages for our favorite Decked Beef.
• We did our beginning-of-the-month grocery run on Sunday evening — a day I would normally hate assigning for this errand, but I anticipate that next week is going to be insanely busy with school visits so had to get this out of the way. But got to close the week on a high: received a shipment from Sang-e-Meel of three books I'm excited to get into: کارِ جہاں دراز ہے by Quratulain Haider (and its looking like it's not going to be an easy read, but I am excited about it regardless), and two poetry books: Fahmida Riaz's سب لعل و گہر, and Kishwar Naheed's میں پہلے جنم میں رات تھی.

Thinking about: gardens and lawns, mostly.

I've restarted reading Olivia Laing's "A Garden Against Time". My first attempt late last year failed, as life was life-ing quite hard at the end of The Most Miserable Year Of My Life™, but I'd been meaning to get back to it particularly because of my renewed interest in our lawn (what I've always thought it to be) or garden (what I want it to see it as now) - both in the front and back of the house. Five years after moving into this house (which was right before COVID, thank God!), I've finally started paying attention to what's happening out there, and I am quite excited by the potential this space has.

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The front and back lawns had been mostly ignored by us for the first few years, even if we had a gardener come in twice every week for basic upkeep. It was mostly a space for the dogs to hang out. I have now started to care for space a bit more in the last couple of years though, particularly as R loves being outdoors. Khasha, our brown labrador who passed away in July 2023, is now also buried in a corner of this lawn, under a weeping bottlebrush. And then when I decided to build R a playhouse for her 2nd birthday last August is when I really started to pay attention to the space. We positioned the playhouse in a corner triangulated by three trees — a weeping fig with massive foliage (and so grass barely grew there due to the shade), a weeping bottlebrush and (according to my plant identifier app) a poison tree — and once we had that playhouse constructed, it made me want to curate the space around it a bit more.

I think subconsciously I've tried not to get too attached to this space is because I always imagine that when and if we do end up buying our own home, it's unlikely that we will be able to afford one with space for such a huge lawn/garden, and so I've been kind of apprehensive of getting used to such a space. It's only been recently for the above mentioned reasons that I have told myself it's okay to enjoy this space while we have it.

So, this winter, I took the liberty of getting all three of the trees mentioned earlier pruned quite extensively... a bit too extensively, but it has made all the difference in the world, particularly with the weeping fig which not only blocked light from getting to the saplings on the other side of the treehouse, but also to our main window from the living room via the study. So pruning them gave us the gift of a less-depressing indoors natural light situation this winter. Come spring, though, and what a joy it has been to see the plants just blossom so wonderfully!

My favorite has been getting to see our poor baby pomegranate sapling (that had probably been planted right before we moved in) grow so handsomely — I'd say by about at least five to six feet, if that's even possible. It sure feels that way. It has sprouted flowers this Spring for the first time ever and I'm so excited to potentially see some fruit this season. And it’s not just the pomegranate tree: the two saplings beside it, which the app identifies as Caribbean copper plants, have grown beautifully as well. Framing the entrance from our front door into the lawn, one of them for sure has shot up by nearly five feet too. The rose shrubs planted nearby, though not fully shaded by the trees, have always bloomed reliably each season — but this Spring, for some reason, they’ve been in constant, generous bloom, fuller and more vibrant than ever before.

The brilliant and consistent bloom this Spring in the front lawn made me excited enough about this space enough to finally get rid of all the weeds in the lawn, and get new grass installed. We have a lush green lawn now, which required a LOT of watering in the early days to get it settled, and I don't know if I want to put in more effort towards a more curated lawn as I'm more interested in the garden vibe. I'll definitely add some outdoor furniture to it, so some more of the lawn space might be taken away eventually.

The back lawn, which has been largely ignored, and has almost always been full of weeds is where I want to experiment with the idea of a garden that can move with me, and adjust in whatever kind of space we're in, if and whenever that happens. I've acquired some plotted plants and some planters and vegetable seeds in an effort to grow something there. They've been stacked up along the back boundary wall on a makeshift stand that has been assembled using some scaffolding bars that we had lying around. It's been set up to frame the view from our bedroom's window, which means it's a view I wake up to everyday, so quite excited about this one.

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There's definitely more thoughts about Laing's book as I read through it, but right now, I am struggling to spatially visualize it overall and unable to get a sense of the scale and the vibe of the garden, despite her detailed descriptions. I've googled it briefly and seen some pictures of it but I can't seem to find any top-down plan of it, so I think I want to attempt sketching out a plan of her garden to see if that helps.