Gayani Jayathilake

Picture this. On  a warm summer day, there I sat in my mini version of a tiny jungle. All my energy had been wreaked off me for the past couple months, because of the novel project I have wrapped and parceled myself in. Sadly this is why my blog gets less care these days. But my blog I believe is where my roots are. And I do come back to it to spread some love on it.

So on this warm sunny morning, I had already penned many a words. And it was during my hour of break time while watching the plants and buzzing bees and the fluttering butterfly that gave me this brilliant idea.  My little jungle in the balcony was my laboratory. My lab rat that I experiment in, for my novel that has a brilliant magical garden in it. And sometimes use them as my illustrations by sketching them. The little patch of forest my husband and I created fills me with life each time I step into it. To me, I’m stepping into the magnificent garden in my book. The garden in my book, my little potted plants in reality, the perfume of the flowers and herbs, the insects and their mischievous little adventures, sketching and painting amidst them, all that put together, was like a match made in garden heaven to me.

So there I was sketching a sketch. And I wasn’t very content with some of the colours I was getting. And there on the side of the plant pots was a cup.  A cup full of dead flower. Not a sad looking state. Not one bit. In fact it was like a colourful confetti cup. I have this habit of snapping off dead dried up flower with a scissor each time I rummaged through the garden. The idea really was to sprinkle them over the plants and give them back to their main plant. I hadn’t. And the cup was overflowing.  Bright yellow early sunrise flowers crammed in there with butterfly blue pincushions and marigolds. What fascinated me was even if they had withered away they hadn’t lost their colour. My colour loving mind marvelled at the striking brightness. I didn’t really have the heart to scatter them.  That’s when the bright bulb appeared above my head.

The  early sunrise flowers were the brightest. I separated them from the rest and picked out the petals. Pouring hot water watched them gurgle. And the immediate hint of color in the water was bliss. I kid you not when I say the scent remained. I felt like even the bees were rolling their eyes on me by now. I kept it aside for the night. Please note, this I did purely to experiment. Nothing professional here. It was just purely the experimental side of me and the primitive ancestors in me sistering together to play. Nothing else was add to this mixture.

This is what I got the next day.

It’s amazing how much colour I got from twenty or thirty very dried up flowers. I presume the colour could and would fade. Hit by sunlight it could fade away faster. Which is why I wouldn’t use it for my illustrations. It was just a feel good satisfying thing to do. Colour from your own homegrown flowers is a satisfying feeling. One to dote and write about.