Photographing Flowers in a Winter Called the Pandemic

Essay and photos by PRIYANKA SACHETI

In one of my very first memories of flowers, I am in my grandfather’s garden in my mother’s hometown, Jodhpur, India. I am three years old, my chubby hands wrapped around a rose, on the verge of plucking it . . . only to hear my grandfather sternly telling me to never ever pluck a flower. He passed away when I was five years old and I deeply regret that I never got to spend more time with him, my sole knowledge of him filtered through others’ memories and the garden he had lovingly created and which continues to thrive. He was a botanist and my mother tells me he treated plants as if they were children, unable to bear seeing them in distress. I wished I could tell him how much refuge and succor I have found in flowers, that photographing flowers gives me joy and peace. And—that I have never ever plucked a flower.

Growing up in Oman, I encountered mostly plastic flowers. They bloomed everywhere, adorning mirrors in beauty salons, spilling out from cut glass vases in our living room, alternating with plastic fruit in roadside coffeeshops, and bunches after bunches in home department stores, each striving to look more real than the other. Sometimes, I would find plastic flowers abandoned in dumpsters, looking as fresh as the day they had been bought, presumably having been replaced by a newer plastic bunch in their former home. I imagined them lying in a landfill, still bright and iridescent, sadly resigned to their immortality. I remember once exclaiming in delight on spotting fake water-encrusted roses a family friend had arranged in a vase on their dining table, the water droplets looking as if they would evanesce at any moment. They never did, of course, faithfully remaining where they were each time I chanced upon them. I may have even asked my mother to buy a bunch for our own living room.

The surrounding desert occasionally bloomed after the rain, but the flowers that appeared afterward were much too small and insignificant for me to pay any heed to them. The flowers I saw most regularly were the white, fuchsia, and vermillion bougainvillea growing in large white tubs in my mother’s garden or spilling down dusty white walls of private homes and buildings. Marigolds and striped petunias sprang up in large numbers every winter in manicured gardens dotting Muscat, using recycled water to green the city. However, when it came to roses, I knew only the sterile scentless blood red ones found in the frozen goods section of supermarkets. Just as the snacks were imported to make Muscat expatriates feel less homesick, the roses, carnations, and other flowers too were flown in from the Netherlands and packaged in plastic, a far cry from their fresh garden selves, looking tired and sorry for themselves, not to mention grossly expensive. Whenever I encountered elaborate floral arrangements in plush hotel lobbies or restaurants or the occasional home, I would reach out to touch them, checking whether they were truly real or one of their plastic cousins. It took me a long time to learn the velvety, satiny feel of a rose petal, to distinguish between that of a machine-softness and nature’s handiwork. Even now, when there is no dearth of flowers in my life, I still can’t help touching flowers in a vase, a habit which will perhaps never ever go away.

During the first spring I spent in England for my undergraduate studies, I remember writing about the delight of encountering flowers. I describe one newly bloomed flower as being so shiny that it looked plasticky; I can still conjure it up, a glossy white flower with a popsicle orange heart. Having known what I thought as exotic flowers, such as daffodils or daisies, only through books or photographs, it was a revelation to see yellow daffodils gradually emerging from the unwintering earth. It was almost as if I had seen a celebrity in flesh for the first time. Perhaps, it was then I started to really observe flowers as opposed to merely noticing their presence: that delicate, large-petaled pale pink rose growing by my dorm or cherry blossom–enveloped trees in the college campus. But I never thought to take pictures of flowers then; the precious film in my analog camera was reserved for documenting people and places in my life, nature a poor second.

It wasn’t until I got married and moved to Pittsburgh many years later that I began to take pictures of landscapes, now armed with a smart phone. Having once more lived in Oman after finishing university, I had almost forgotten there were something called seasons apart from a scorching summer and mildly pleasant winter. In Pittsburgh, I inhabited a land where there were as many gradations to the weather as there were hues in a turning autumn tree. During my first winter there, I remember pausing to observe cherry trees that were budding even while snow fell around them and banked at their feet. The trees were quietly welcoming new beginnings even in the coldest depths of winter, knowing that spring would be on its way.

Months later, I awoke one morning to the sight of snow enveloping the roofs and hills around me. I blinked once, twice: wasn’t winter over already? But what I thought was snow were actually flowers, the trees mimicking the snow coverlet they had worn for many long harsh months. The white-pink dogwood, peach, apple, and cherry flower-filled trees thrived around me and the pavement was filled with flower drifts, banks after banks of fallen flower petals, rendering even the otherwise unremarkable bald concrete unspeakably lovely. I wondered how precious a thing such as those petals could lie on the street, to be trampled upon, to be blown away by the wind, to vanish as if they had never existed. I could not get enough of them, either in person or on my phone.

I made the effort to learn the names of the flowers and trees, something that I had never bothered to do before: cherry, dogwood, apple, almond, and winterberry. For example, what was that tree whose blooms resembled pale mauve candles and were among the first ones to do so during spring? Ah, the magnolia. I encountered one for the first time in a churchyard, its canopy so thickly covered with flowers that I could scarcely see the church spire behind it. During a trip to Boston, I encountered buttery yellow magnolia flowers for the first time. My inner desert girl was unaccustomed to such a dazzling surfeit of beauty, of these gloriously blooming trees that appeared like flower gardens growing in the sky. I remember picking up magnolia petals and pressing them between the pages of a book; they turned tea brown a few weeks later, resembling the feathers from the plumage of an unknown bird. I photographed the petals nesting inside the pages of the book, marveling that they looked as beautiful as they had while in bloom. I lost the petals but still possess those pictures, both of the flowers in bloom and their fallen selves, frozen in time, like unmelting snowflakes.

My husband and I moved to New Delhi, India, in the fall of 2014. Having previously only visited India on holidays, I now began to explore what it meant to call it home—and that included paying attention to all the plants that grew there, documenting them on my phone. I would spend two winters in New Delhi. The second one stands out in my memory in particular, for how brutal it was, in both reality and spirit. That winter, even on days when the sun shone, its rays piercing the soupy brown smog, I could not see the flowers or trees around me. I could no longer see the beauty that had revealed itself to me through the lens of a phone camera for the past so many years. I did not take many pictures. I had nothing to take pictures of. Bright red silk cotton flowers began to illumine empty tree branches, like tardily adorned Christmas trees, the first of the trees to bloom in Delhi spring; the red splotches instead hurt my eyes and I looked away, almost as if I gazed directly at the sun. In my head, there was a fog that refused to lift no matter how much I tried to will it away.

One bleak, cold March morning, I was sitting by my living room window, looking out onto the end of the road, where the resident street dogs were sleeping beneath two trees. I realized that both the trees and the dogs were enveloped in soft mauve flowers. For the first time in days, I picked up my phone and walked down to the trees, gazing at the flower-filled canopy. A breeze came out of nowhere and the canopy appeared to dance. A purple-striped mauve flower detached itself and brushed past me before falling down upon one of the dog’s foreheads. The dog stirred, rose, and ambled away. I bent down and held up the flower against the tree, as if the tree had sent me a letter whose contents were especially for me to read. After a very long time, I took a picture of a flower. Upon returning to my apartment, still holding the flower, I looked it up: it was called the kachnar in Hindi.

Afterward, it seemed that a tree was in bloom wherever I went in the city. I started to spend my mornings taking walks in the neighborhood, acquainting myself with all the trees that grew there. I picked up all the fallen flowers I had found on my walks and nested them inside bowls in my home. Once Delhi’s spring gradually began transitioning into its blisteringly hot summer, new trees sprang into performance, each one seemingly intent on out-blooming the other. I saw a jacaranda tree in bloom for the first time in a tiny pocket of a garden, its canopy appearing like an enchanted mauve cloud silhouetted against a rosy dusk sky. A yellow trumpet tree grove brightened up an otherwise nondescript garden, its audacious yellow blooms competing with that of the sunlight. Now that I had started taking pictures of them, I could not stop. I had never known that blooming trees would bring me so much joy, peace even; I now wondered how I had lived without them all this time.

After spending two years in New Delhi, I moved to the city that I presently live in—Bangalore, Southern India. The entirely distinct climate and landscape here revealed to me flora I had never previously encountered. One of them was the pink trumpet tree, Tabebuia avellanedaea, a South American species that made itself at home in the city like so many other trees from other parts of the world. Come November, the streets are filled with these trees in magnificent bloom, earning them the moniker of being Bangalore’s cherry blossom. When you approach the trees and examine them, the globular bunches of these yellow-hearted pink flowers appear like flower cumuli; the slightest breeze and the flowers rain down upon the earth until it is almost as if the tree is staring at its reflection in a grass mirror. I have been anticipating and witnessing the blooming of these trees across Bangalore for the last five years, observing their mercurial blooming patterns. For example, during a particularly rainy, chilly November, the trees sulked and preferred to conserve their energy to instead bloom in January, the city suddenly filled with flamboyant splashes of pink. By now, I have become familiar with so many of the trees, especially individual ones growing on street sides or corners. Whenever I pass them by, I forever think of them in a cloud of pink, unseeing the unremarkable leaf cloaks they hide themselves in for the rest of the year. In my mind and my camera roll, they are forever pink.

In the spring of 2020, my husband and I travelled to Palo Alto, California, for what we thought would be a six-week sojourn, where my husband would pursue a research fellowship at Stanford University and I would take time out to recover from  lingering health issues, write, take walks, and photograph the unfurling spring. The sojourn instead turned into us being stranded there for three months, at the onset of the pandemic and the radical upending of the world as we knew it.

The upheaval that the virus had wreaked upon the world would have been traumatic even if we had been in our home in Bangalore, but marooned in a land halfway across the world further added to our extreme disorientation and bewilderment. The fact that we had no idea when or how we could return home further compounded our anxiety. The faint silver lining of California’s stay-at-home order was that we could get outside of the house and take walks, temporarily escaping the fear haunting our minds, so we made every effort to discover new parks and gardens in the vicinity. Oblivious to the world fragmenting one day at a time, nature only knew how to stay its course: budding, blooming, and greening, preparing to embrace yet another spring.

The Elizabeth Gamble Garden in Palo Alto became my particular refuge. I discovered a new flower or tree each time I visited there, losing myself in its gardens fat with striped roses, camellias, tulips, irises, poppies, and foxgloves, along with several kinds of blooming trees. One of my most precious moments was seeing wisteria in full bloom, mauve streamers enveloping porticos and gazebos, a sight that I had never previously seen.

When we ventured forth from the magical insulation that the garden afforded from the pandemic, and, well, life, we walked through the streets and observed individual private gardens. On one of our walks, I stopped to smell musk roses, which I knew as desi gulab (“local rose” in Hindi), associating them with weddings in Rajasthan and roadside flower stalls in Bangalore. Encountering this bush growing in an alley in Palo Alto momentarily took me home, scents so poignantly capable of returning one to the past. I picked up the fallen petals and inhaled them long and hard, my deep yearnings to return to the sanctuary of home crystallized in that moment.

One warm June day, we finally got ourselves out on a flight from the United States to Bangalore. In the weeks leading up to that momentous day, we had shuffled around the Bay Area before finally staying in an AirBnB in Berkeley for a fortnight. Summer was beginning to make its presence felt: the cherry tree outside the house was fruiting, the camellias were fried brown, and three new roses bloomed during our stay. The umbrella-shaped red bottlebrush tree rained red feathers on the concrete and virtually every garden in the city appeared to sprout iridescent bougainvillea wigs, urgently in need of a haircut, like so many of us in those days. I spotted poppies that looked like fried eggs and visited a rose garden in the form of an amphitheater, encountering an anthology of rose stories, each name conjuring up a tale. A few days before we finally left the United States, I recall sitting on a bench on the garden’s uppermost story and looking out at the sea in the distance, soft, silent, and unmoving, like slumbering mercury. The breeze carried the fragrance of different roses to me, blotting out all the fear and bewilderment that I had inhabited in the previous days. It struck me then and even now that if it had not been for all the flowers I met during that time, I honestly do not know how I could have endured all those months of limbo.

The days were passing but it seemed that one season was constant: in my eyes, the pandemic had now become synonymous with winter. In April last year, when the second COVID wave struck India in the most terrifying of ways, claiming me as a victim as well, I had just returned from Dubai, to which my parents had recently moved from neighboring Oman. Truth be told, I had always considered Dubai to be all plastic and glass and dizzying levels of make-believe with little by way of green. This Dubai trip proved me wrong, the city now considerably greener and also home to some of the most beautiful bougainvillea I had ever happened to see. Given that I associated bougainvillea with Oman, encountering these flowers in a place where my parents were now trying to make home made me feel a little closer to the city. During daily morning walks, I found myself photographing one iridescent cloud of bougainvillea after another, glowing in the mellow Dubai spring sunshine. I was also pleasantly surprised and enchanted to see blooming yellow trumpet trees, cousins of the pink trumpet trees that adorned Bangalore streets during March. The cheery sunniness of the trees rivaled that of the Dubai sun, particularly vivid when silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. I flew out of Bangalore, my camera roll crammed with Dubai’s flowers.

Little did I know that those pictures—and all of my memories of flowers—would nourish me for weeks to come. All this time, I had found and been assiduously cultivating a figurative garden full of flowers, admiring and basking in their beauty before going my way. However, in days to come, these flowers would move beyond being mere emblems of beauty: they would become torches of hope, healing, and a safe space, a world that had been there for me before and would continue being there for me.

Upon contracting COVID, I had to be hospitalized for six days. During those long, bleak days, hearing the endless screeching of ambulances or nurses whisper in hushed tones of yet another patient who succumbed to the virus, I remember hobbling to the window to see copper-pod trees in bloom, miniature clouds of bougainvillea dotting the terrace of a nearby hotel. I clung to that sight feverishly, promising myself that I would soon be among those trees, touching their flowers in person.

And yet, no matter how much I reassured myself, those trees seemed frighteningly distant, almost as if from a dream or a parallel universe. In my present state of mind, they increasingly became like mirages that would crumble upon touching—and after a while, I stopped gazing from the window, reluctant to engage with a promise that merely seemed to tantalize more than anything else.

In the days that followed my hospital discharge and during my halting steps toward recovery, I found myself compelled to share my photos of flowers on social media. And yet, while updating my Instagram with yet another bougainvillea post, I would ask myself: was it right for me to post pictures of flowers at this time? People were literally gasping for oxygen, dying from the lack of it, reduced to begging for hospital beds, children orphaned, families bereaved, what had been flesh and blood yesterday swiftly turning into ash and memories. Struggling to sleep in those initial days, I woke up one morning to see a news item revealing that that trees in Delhi parks were being cut down to provide wood to cremate bodies because of a severe wood shortage and too many bodies. In those excruciating moments, both for my body and the mind, I asked myself: what recompense could flowers possibly offer in this combusting world? I still do not have an answer. But I am also still taking pictures of flowers.

It boggles my mind that the pandemic has entered a third year. In the last year, I have photographed flowers more relentlessly than ever, continuing to post them on my social media platforms. And in return, the online community that I have cultivated across these platforms keeps on sending me virtual flowers; they tag me on Instagram handles of gardens and gardeners, send pictures from their gardens and public parks, and more. We have forged a kinship from these virtual flower letters, a kinship that gently asks us to find our joys as and where we can.

A few weeks ago, finding myself in the midst of a third COVID wave in India and restrictions imposed upon Bangalore once again, I made a trip to Bangalore’s Cubbon Park to chase away my lassitude—and discover in delight that a pink trumpet tree that I had been observing for many years had finally spectacularly burst into bloom. After all those years of sulking, it had chosen to bloom at a time where it afforded so much joy and beauty to all those who had come to experience its blooming. I stood beneath the tree, envisioning the flowers akin to tied balloons, wondering if they would ever fly, what it would mean to fly. These balloons did fly, after all, whirling their way into the air, their absence leaving a space for their successors to replace them in the coming season. If the pandemic has been a winter of sorts, these flowers have been a consistent reminder that spring will inevitably be on its way, that virtually nothing can stop the trees from blooming.