From Her Village Garden to a Small Terrace: My Mother’s Living Legacy

My mother’s relationship with plants did not begin on a terrace. It began in the much larger garden at our village home, where fruit trees, flowering plants, medicinal herbs, and other useful species grew together as part of daily life.

That garden was hers in the fullest sense. She knew its rhythms through long attention: what needed water, what could withstand heat, what flowered in a particular season, and which plant had a place in the kitchen, in worship, or in household care. Gardening was not an occasional hobby for her. It was one of the quiet continuities of her life.

When the village became farther away

As she stopped travelling regularly to the village, she did not simply leave that relationship behind. She began making a smaller garden on a compact terrace. The scale changed—from open ground and established trees to containers and carefully measured space—but the instinct remained the same. She wanted plants close to her.

Her garden, and our shared design

It is important to me to describe our roles accurately. The gardening knowledge, the attachment to useful and beautiful plants, and the care that sustained them belonged to my mother. She initiated and tended the compact garden as an extension of the life she had made around plants in the village.

My contribution was different. I designed the terrace space, curated the pots, and organised the containers and plants into a coherent garden. I thought about scale, circulation, height, texture, and how the pots could sit together rather than accumulate as unrelated objects. Her plants gave the place its life; I gave the smaller space a structure in which that life could be seen and enjoyed.

The result was neither a reduced copy of the village garden nor a decorative terrace assembled from scratch. It was a shared creation between us: her long practice of growing and caring, translated through the spatial limits and design possibilities of a terrace.

A garden that continues

The garden is now maintained at our office. I will keep its precise location and operational details private, but its everyday role is simple. It is a place where people can step away for a few minutes, sit with coffee, notice a new flower, or look closely at leaves that would otherwise pass without attention.

That continuing use matters to me. A memorial need not always be an object set apart from ordinary life. This garden remains alive precisely because it asks for the ordinary acts she understood so well: watering, pruning, repotting, observing, waiting, and beginning again.

Learning the plants by name

To preserve more than a general impression, I began cataloguing the plants and consolidating repeated views of the same plant. The present catalogue contains 32 proposed plant profiles, each shown with one representative photograph and accompanied by names in English, Odia, Hindi, Sanskrit, and botanical Latin, along with care, utility, safety, and identification confidence.

Some identifications are necessarily tentative. A photograph may not show a flower, fruit, leaf underside, scent, sap, or other diagnostic feature. Those entries remain visibly qualified and should be confirmed before any edible or medicinal use. The catalogue also gives prominent warnings for plants such as oleander, desert rose, pencil cactus, periwinkle, pothos, and peace lily.

What remains

When I look at this garden now, I see several times and places at once: the village garden in which her knowledge grew, the compact terrace she prepared when travel became difficult, the arrangement we made together, and the garden’s present life as a shared place of pause.

Plants do not preserve memory by remaining unchanged. They grow unevenly, flower, shed leaves, outgrow pots, and sometimes have to be replaced. Their continuity is active rather than fixed. Perhaps that is why this garden feels like a fitting legacy. It survives through care.