"Can you believe that we had pests in our garden when I was young? " I said to my little angel.
"What are pests Grandma? " she lisped.
Angela's beautiful curls gently swayed in the fan's breeze as she touched the sunflower with her tiny hands. Her hands were lost in the huge expanse of the flower.
"Pests are small critters which suck up the juices of plants and eat their leaves preventing them from growing strong and producing flowers and fruits," I explained to the little one trying to keep things simple.
"Can you show me how a critter looks?" she asked, her angelic smile lighting up her face. She looked like a sunflower herself, bright and cheerful I thought. I scrolled through the thousands of images using the bar code on my hand to show her what a pest looked like.
"Ooooh this one looks so pretty granny, why do you call it a pest, you should call it a pet," she said.
"Angela, though this one looks pretty it ate up all my roses and never let me enjoy them," I said my face wrinkling deeply at the thought of the hundreds of liters of neem oil I sprayed on my plants to keep pests at bay.
These kids may never truly understand what an annoyance pests were. Now all you have to do was to fill in the names of plants and their age (in weeks, months or years) and let AI do the rest of the work for you. You didn't have dirty your hands digging up the soil, fighting pests, watering plants or even working under the scorching Indian sun feeling the discomfort as sweat rang down your face and body and you slaved day and night to make your plants grow.
Life is simple now, you could grow any kind of plant in your garden with the artificial climate which AI created for you. No one needs to know much about plants, AI took care of those details for you had you just had to ensure that your computer was working fine and everything was working to schedule.
These plants look artificial too, they seem too healthy for any good. There is not a speck of dust on their leaves I think as I touch a leaf. There is no need to pollinators to come into the garden to work, artificial critters do the job, they know the perfect time to pollinate the flowers. Not a single flower drops off the plant. Can you believe that?
Somehow I feel that the lime in this garden didn't smell as sharp as the ones I used to grow in my garden back then, nor do the roses smell as sweet. Fruits don't taste half as good as they did a couple of decades ago, sun ripened fruits had loads of flavor and taste. In fact I thought that all fruits tasted alike now. A garden without birds didn't feel like one at all, it felt like walking into a sterile lab.
I drooled as I remembered the Alphonso mangoes in my garden in the twenties. The flavor, the taste, the smell I yearned for those wonderful days. It's true we had to work hard but we reaped the fruit of our labor. I enjoyed eating the mango right under the tree with the juice running down to my elbow. I could almost smell the fruit now.
How could you explain all this to a child who had no idea what soil is or what pests looked like? All they knew was that they could walk into that space they called garden and pick what they wanted whenever they wanted. They knew nothing about seasons. They got everything in every season. Sounds wonderful right? Naah, there is no thrill in anything anymore. You don't have to wait for anything, instant gratification and wide choices in everything makes life boring. You are desperate to create some new kind of fruit or grain, these novelties feel good for a while but to us of the past generation it seemed like AI was the Grinch who stole the beauty of gardening. It was similar to the epidemic they created called Covid19 back then.
Gardening was not much fun anymore, you ordered stuff out of catalogues and kept them in your garden and pretended to be a gardener. I want to travel back in time, back to the 2010 and enjoy gardening once again. Maybe I am old, maybe I live in the past, but this is surely not the garden of my dream.
"Come my angel let's not worry about pests anymore, lets pick the fruits we need for dinner carve a colorful feast for ourselves," I said as I took her by the hand and let her pick the fruits.
Thanks for stopping by to read and support. This is my last minute response to the creative garden challenge
Image used in this post belong to me.