The tale of a sow thistle

 

It’s a tale of an industrious spiny-leaved sow thistle. It may not be a scenic introduction to a garden but it piques the senses with its meticulous as well as untidy presentation. Though a herb in the scheme of nature, it’s condemned as a weed by we humans caught in a morass of radicalism fuelled by our utilitarian spirit. While the little plant stands silently engrossed, swathed in incredulous silence, its tiny flowers carry amazing lightness in smile.

The fragile furor unfolds around. Bouquets and brickbats are flaunted on the basis of what is useful and what is not. The farmers have a particular aversion to its presence in the cropped fields. An entire range of poison has been contrived to kill it. The weedicides are highly effective. You see the revealing, spectacular remains, with our triumph incredibly detailed over the withering nuisance.

The entire farming community baying for its blood, this particular sow thistle looked for a safe corner beyond the farmers’ sickle and fumigation showers. It grows there in the circular skylight at the top end of the barn’s wall. Old houses with cracks are now perhaps the last refuge of the untamed and the wild strains of nature. The winter rains lashed with a delectable flavor as the sow thistle picked out the tiny crack where the mankind isn’t still at war with space, a little crack in the small skylight.

Earlier the monsoon rains lashed. It was well sheltered and a furious rainstorm would give it just a decent amount of water. It thrived with a well-conceived and well-preserved spirit of youth. Then the winter sneaked in with its icy power-trappings. Facing south, it simply soaked tumblers of sunlight in the afternoons as the kind sun streamed from the southern side.

The entire circular skylight is now covered with its luxuriant growth. Its bluish green spiny leaves carry the aura of thinly veiled fiction, a kind of delicate balance between facts and fables. As a mark of its triumph, now it flaunts little yellow flowers that look similar to wild dandelion. There are many flat-topped arrays of flower heads that hold the prospects of a dandelion-type smile on an old, withering wall. There is still hope—a wild plant having a foothold among we humans and smiling breezily. Well, some more flowers are always good for this world.