The layout is grand, but the walls are broken down. Weeds are everywhere. I have been tended at the edges, and there are bright blooming new flowers and bushes (brought from all over the world). The gaps are filled in by artificial foliage.
This is all for show, really. Most of it is fake.
It looks good to people who drive by the outskirts, people who drive fast.
Inside the garden the paths that are still left are scarcely visible. All the rows that were meant for the cultivation of delicate things are overrun with wild grasses and the crude but tenacious plants that can grow anywhere.
Other parts are barren, blighted by invasive weeds and plagues of insects, or dried up in exhausted unnourished soil. Yet another section is flooded into swampland and reeks of stagnant water and dead leaves.
There are places, nonetheless, where roses still grow. The bushes are rarely pruned, and so the roses are wild. But they have not lost their beauty.
A few of the great old trees survive, spreading shade in their spots and vitality beneath their soil. They nurture mosses and vines and clover and the hardy things of the forest that no one notices, but that break through the ground and reach up in search of the sun.
And there are flowers. Small and simple, pale and common, large and strange flowers in different places. Some look misshapen or half-dead, struggling against a polluted atmosphere. Half-dead, but also half-alive.
And they are flowers. They are alive. They have their own beauty.
I am an old patchy spoiled garden on a ruined estate—and the years have made a wreck of me, a wasteland.
But the sun still shines, the rains fall, and even now, a few new things are born from the earth.
There are new things and old things that still grow.
