Mary, Mary, quite contrary

Their first lessons in plant life came when they were each assigned a garden patch and told that they could put in anything they liked but they had to take care of it. "Rake it and sow it, water it and weed it, it's entirely your baby," and the three children under 10 went to work enthusiastically. The eldest had already learnt a lot of plant lore from following his botanist father around for a decade.

The middle one knew she had to do it because she made it a matter of principle to do everything the elder one did. For the youngest, it was thrilling just to be allowed to do something on her own, and she happily waddled into the project, unaware that she would later come to fit the description of the main character in a nursery rhyme she loved - Mary, Mary, quite contrary.

That first garden patch was quickly abandoned by her and the rest of the family indulgently forgave the three-year-old's limited attention span while crunching tender carrots and admiring the deep purple of the brinjals from the magic of the other two's green fingers. It's so much easier to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labour, was probably the first unwittingly learnt lesson from the great garden experiment.

Through the years, in every place they lived, there were beds of flowers, fields of vegetables and grains and orchards of fruit, but other than putting a truant foot into well-turned soil, her idea of being close to nature was to climb onto the lowest branches of a guava tree and spend the day reading a book or playing with a plastic doll. The green fingers evident in the rest of the family had clearly given her a miss.

When the time came to take that big leap into the world of adults and set up her own home, all she wanted was a neat, clean apartment above the tree line, free of creepers and creepy crawlies, the greenery at a distance. The only concession she was willing to consider was off-the-shelf grocery store greens that filled the refrigerator. But life doesn't work that way - she found herself in a large open space that cried out for cultivation.

Initially, those spaces were ignored as she waited for someone to hoe and sow. When the bitter truth hit - that she was the only 'someone' available - she found a unique solution to her problem. She got herself a pet and gave it the complete run of the 'garden'. She also got in the pet's pals and allowed them a free-for-all. They dashed here and there, uprooted the few tufts of grass that had survived before their coming, scattered the bricks that had marked empty flowerbeds crying out for colour and were the happiest pets on the block. And when others talked about their rose bushes or silver oaks and waited for her to speak of her garden, the pets provided her with many distracting and amusing tales to tell.

The happiest stay was in a desert home, with swathes of sand around the house. A football ground, a badminton court, a cricket pitch, unlimited space for rough and tumble, and absolutely no need to go through the motions of laying out a 'garden' in such a parched place.

Then, she moved into a flat - sleek, small and all she'd wanted for two decades. Once every bit of furniture was in place, perfectly aligned and immaculately clean, there still seemed to be something missing.

"A rooftop garden," she declared. "That's what is needed." And she set out to be as contrary as her nursery rhyme inspiration.

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.