Our Mother's Flower Garden

Q) You have been making little videos of flowers, why have you been so interested in flowers?

Ans) Time Lapses of flowers are available on the web, it's not my own invention but I wanted to credit the presence of flowers in my childhood so I made some of my own. I have been brought up in Delhi but grew up in a house where our mother kept a flower garden and every spring, rather around the year the flower garden was full of blooming flowers. Now that I have spent so many years back in Delhi, even though we now live in a different space, she still keeps a garden and the flowers in her garden have still kept me company. They feel like an inseparable part of my childhood.

Dr Veena's Flower Garden

Q) Was it because you were kept too much at 
a home with a flower garden, that you grew fond of all those flowers?

Ans) Yes. Too many years spent indoors in the house in Delhi, where most of the time that I was indoors studying or consuming Bollywood film music and living within an imaginary world where I used to imagine life outside of a home, the flower garden was the outdoor space for me and I spent a lot of time, just being with flowers blooming.  Our mother grew up in Kashmir where she was surrounded by flowers and she wanted to add the presence of flowers to our childhood in Delhi too and I am very thankful to her for that.

Q) What else did those flowers contribute to your childhood?

Ans) Colour and Fragrance and being there in loneliness. Even though I watched black and white cinema along with colour films and tv, the presence of those flowers and watching them bloom, added all their colour into my eyes and I felt surrounded by a lot of bright colour, red and pink roses, flowers with sweet nectar, big multicolored dahlias, bright blue cornflowers, little dog flowers that seemed like they would come alive and start talking, yellow pansies, just too many flowers to name and remember. 

Q) What did those flowers do to you when you saw so many blooming?

Ans) They added a lot of happiness to my life, they were blooming because of a lot of care given to them by the gardener and our mother. Spring was a time, when there were final examinations which created a lot of stress, but it was also a time when the garden was in full bloom. I didn't like to pluck those flowers, I only liked to see them blooming in their own spaces. By April the garden was always in full bloom.

Q) How differently do you see flowers now, now that you spent time making videos on them?

Ans) Time lapse is a different way of watching flowers bloom, we cannot see them blooming like this with our own eyes but with the vision of the camera, we can see them blooming faster and consuming them visually is also much faster. In a few seconds a flower blooms open and is there to consume with our eyes. Once again, flowers have healed me and been there with me in loneliness , they are still full of colour and they still offer themselves open for our senses to consume. The fragrance of flowers exists in real flowers blooming 'live' but even if videos cannot communicate that fragrance yet, they offer a lot for the senses to consume. 

I also feel closer to the garden space mysteriously, ever since I started working on flower time lapse videos, I feel more connected to plants and flowers and they seem more alive to me and even though I want to be closer to them it is necessary to know that some flowers are toxic, you cannot be too close to them, for instance you cannot 'eat' them and I rely on the world wide web to know more about the world of flowers. I want to know how we are connected to flowers and plants in mysterious,invisible ways.

Q) What was it like Travelling to the Flower Gardens, Mughal Gardens of Kashmir with your parents, your mother especially?

Ans) I travelled with them to Kashmir and we saw the Mughal Gardens at Nishat and Shalimar hoping it would add a happy memory from their own youth and I hope to write in greater detail how that experience has been because I was brought up being told about these famed Mughal Gardens of Kashmir by our mother and it was the first time I went there. But It was only after a few visits to Kashmir, last few years that I began working on flower time lapse videos.