Aunty Uche’s Garden (2020)
Growing up on Tumblr, I fell in love first with the aesthetics of plants. Supple green surfaces arching to the sun, runner plants framing walls with ceiling-high windows, monstera leaves like palms… they all presented themselves to me as beauty. And I believed them.
As soon as I moved into the first room of my own, I started collecting plants and flowers on trips to the Columbia Road Sunday flower market. And even though my thumb is far from green, I did my best to baby them. In turn, they mothered me with their company, beauty, and oxygen.
During a very difficult period last year, I encountered Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing in which she made the case for paying attention to our surrounding natural world, as a way of tending to our senses of nuance, context, and belonging in the world. By then, I had developed a hobby in flowers: fresh bouquets every week, exploring/learning their scents, photographing flowers I see on the pavements and on trees on the sidewalks on the streets. Odell’s argument strengthened my commitment.
Not long after that encounter with Odell, I moved back home to Enugu, Nigeria, where I tried to continue my hobby. But of course, the landscape was different. Yes, it is a very vegetative city, but flowers are harder to come by. Part of the cultural difference is that flowers aren’t a thing here. Most decorators at weddings use artificial flowers, most people refer to landscaping shrubs as flowers, and very rarely does one find live plants indoors.
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One day, my cousin posted a bouquet of fresh flowers arranged by a friend on Instagram, to promote her friend’s business. Three chains of connections later, I got Aunty Uche’s phone number and a date to visit what I thought was a small garden of flowers.
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It has been 15 years since Aunty Uche and her family moved into this compound with a vast expanse of land where she grows both flowers and crops. The land, big enough to be called an estate, has a fence separating the compound from a stream. Every week for months now, I go there to learn more about plants, indulge in their beauty and let their grace wash over me. On the first day, my wandering destructive fingers crushed a bud and soon I learnt that the cost of such carelessness could be an entire paw-paw tree. From Aunty Uche, I learnt how lessons from the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree from the Bible (Luke 13:6-9) helped her save one of her paw-paw trees and plant gist like how you can tell species of mango trees apart by tasting their leaves.
The photos in this project were shot over the weeks since I met Aunty Uche and intentionally formatted as postcards dispatched from her home. I also sat down with her to talk about the home she has made out of the land.
Aunty Uche, was it a deliberate choice to move to a home with a farm or was this a surprise?
It was not deliberate; we were simply looking for a quiet, bigger place compared to the flat where the children grew up in. It had the size and the serenity, and the added joy of being able to plant flowers in real soil and not just in pots. My husband and I enjoy flowers even though I do the nurturing. In previous places we lived people used to say jokingly that you’ll know which was our flat by the flowers on the balcony. Good a thing the children were already grown and most had moved out for school. But they took to it, nonetheless; they accepted it and liked it for the spaciousness that afforded them privacy, and the adventure!
How did you go about tilling this from the bush it was 15 years ago; what has that journey been like?
We have done it with assistance, both paid and unpaid. Then, we had a domestic help and the children. Rachel has been working with us for over 10 years. The children found it exciting to nurture the immediate environment around the house, to plant things and watch them grow. But the larger expanse of bush in the compound required clearing for which we continue to have paid help. Sometimes we get people that come to help us cultivate cassava and so we’re sure we’ll have hands helping with weeding from time to time.
Have you had any major challenges, living on such a large expanse of land, some of it uncultivated?
Crawling rodents and reptiles. Twice we’ve had the same 7-foot snake come through the soak-away and up the guest room toilet. But no casualties so far haha!
Do you or your children have any favourite memories from the land?
Not that I know of. For me, it’s the fact that this was bare land when we moved in. Anyone coming here now would think these plants have been like this since, but we put in everything; even the climbing Monstera on the wall and the Ixora hedge on the roundabout with the oak tree. I remember when I was planting the Ixoras and one of my husband’s friends came visiting. I recall him telling me that the beauty will show really nicely in a year’s time. Seeing what we have put into the years of nurturing come out so well is a very lovely continuing memory.
Okay, wild card question, Aunty Uche: Does the farm have any mystery for you that 15years on you’re still trying to decode?
Not one thing that I know of. It is a private property not owned by us. So ultimately, it’s a place to live in for the moment and when the time comes, we let it go and move on. My life principle is that if you’re a faithful steward with what belongs to another man, yours will come to you.