Golden trumpet trees, covid healing, and the promise of spring
By: Priyanka Sacheti
Tags: Dubai, Mental Health, Covid Diaries, Trees, Nature Writing

How flower and tree memories from past and present are giving me the gift of hope during these turbulent times

When I left Bangalore on 22nd February this year for what was a long overdue trip to Dubai to visit my family, I found myself thinking that I was going to miss out on Bangalore’s incredible spring gifts. I was thinking in particular of the sunlight-hued finery its streets would be adorned with as they did every spring in the city. I was thinking of the Tabebuia argentea trees (popularly known as golden trumpet trees), a South American visitor which had indelibly woven itself into Bangalore’s urban treescape.

While the cotton-candy colored Tabebuia rosea would usher in what would be popularly and dramatically called the Bangalore Sakura all through March, these smaller but no less mighty powerhouses of soul-nourishing yellow would be gifting the world yet another way to appreciate trees in bloom too.

It’s one of life’s quiet yet magnificent pleasures: to see a tree in joyous bloom.

For the last four years, I had been joyfully documenting this Bangalore tree theatre on my phone along with preserving them in my words. Every year, I took what appeared to be identical pictures of them in bloom and yet, still, each year’s blooming appeared to be unique and distinct in its own. Like many other trees, these trees too had played a long part in healing and supporting me through life’s crises and struggles. I would miss seeing them, I would miss being part of their blooming journey. But I told myself that they would return again as they would always do, for such is the nature of seasons and cycles.

I was nonetheless privy to few theatrical glimpses from both these flowering trees before I left the city and I was grateful enough for that. Hadn’t the pandemic taught me more deeply and passionately than ever the power of gratitude and definitively inhabiting the moment? I was determined to embrace those lessons to the fullest, wishing to focus on what I had as opposed to what I couldn’t. I savoured the blooming of the trees that I did see, admired the carpet of pink and yellow flowers scattered at my feet, and basked in them falling down upon me, tree and sky gifts.

And then I flew to Dubai. But I had a surprise waiting for me there. A city that I had once pronounced as a dizzying, artificial forest of plastic and glass springing forth from a bland, blank desert, green and flowers incidental to its vision, was disproving me wrong — and how. And it was the appearance of these golden yellow trumpet trees, peeking from gardens and streets, jumping out like a glorious surprise, which was the most gratifying gift of them all.

Someone had made the decision to plant these trees in the streets of Dubai and it was truly a honor to see them all over in the city, adding manifold textures and layers to the geometrical, neon, glass urban spaces and lines. I saw them surrounding a metal sculpture coincidentally of a tree in a sculpture park, singing yellow duets with bougainvilleas in gardens, and proudly lampposting their brightness at noon on street corners.

To see these trees spread their sweet visuals of joy and color in the desert was an experience quite like no other.

Bangalore memories were remoulding themselves into Dubai ones; these trees were dissolving into new tree memories which belonged to Dubai alone.

One morning, as I watched a golden trimpet tree in iridescent, unadulterated yellow finery, showering flowers below a blue sky, I found the sight literally warming my heart. I knew the trees would soon lose their flowers but it did not matter just then: in my head, they would forever be blooming. It was a Dubai memory that I would carry with me as precious cargo in my suitcase. The trees had assuaged my yearnings and reminded me once again of how nature and trees possess the powerful capacity to abstract disgtant homes wherever they happen to grow. We can never be homesick if we have trees around us, that is for sure.

When I returned to India, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the golden trumpet trees had now started to renounce the flowers and donned their sensible green leaves again. But a few flowers peeked forth through anyway, telling me that they hadn’t forgotten me.

And then covid struck me. I was lost to the land of fever, fear, coughing, discomfort, anxiety, and more. My world slowly became reduced to a dun-colored hospital room, oxygen support, drips, injections, and medicines. The world outside was crumpling into despair, each ambulance siren puncturing its way through my heart with electric intensity. When I could no longer bear to look at social media, I turned to my phone and instead escaped into that enchanted world of yellow and blue and trees and flowers which I had unknowingly stockpiled for days like this. It was hard to believe that it had only been a few weeks ago I had been partaking of this most elementary pleasure.

Back from the hospital and walking the streets of healing, one anxious, tentative step at a time, I turned to these trees once again, expressing a simple, unalloyed, unadorned desire.

To sit below a golden-feathered tree and think of sunlight. That’s all: sunlight. A simple, unadorned, naked pleasure. To think of this sunlit tree bearing sunlit flowers. To imagine why it came here, how it has made home in these dun, manicured streets, what is it thinking about the earth it left behind. Aren’t such imaginings the most elementary of gifts and pleasures that’ll one inevitably takes for granted?

I wonder what you are doing right now though, o golden tree. The flowers have left you, the sky is a scorching torch, and the heat, a heavy, mercurial presence. But you will survive because you know a spring will await for you. Be you and I dream together then: we will sit together again one day, the flowers raining down upon us and enfolding us in the most radiant of storms.

Every desert is a garden. I unknowingly planted seeds of hope when I left. Now I will wait to see them to bloom.

Growing up as a child and young adult, I always had a complicated relationship with yellow, finding it too harsh and overwhelming and invasive. But for now, as I navigate through many complicated, diverse layers of darkness, I cannot be more grateful for this yellow and the succour it has brought me.

The promise of spring in the coming year calls us both: the flowers the tree is waiting to gift the world with next year, a clean, pure space of healing for me. And it is with that thought, I keep on walking, imagining one flower below my foot at a time, allowing myself the insane, incredible, and life-giving world of hope.