Cultivating magic amid a tragic backdrop in a ‘secret garden’

We call it the “secret garden”, even though it’s public and uncultivated.

For our family, it has recently served as a place for magic moments among tragic times, especially during the three months we didn’t leave our neighborhood when China was in the full grip of COVID-19.

It’s an abandoned lot on the university campus where we live in Beijing that’s on the border between the school’s quiet, green grounds and a bustling patchwork of plazas.

And it exists in metaphorical limbo between a man-made and wild space.

The spot seems to be little known among our neighbors, since there are typically a handful of people there at most.

That is, it’s not only a romantic place in the connotative sense but also Romantic in reference to the philosophical and aesthetic movement in which gardens in places such as Portugal were cultivated with the intention of letting them become wild over time.

The “secret garden”, however, almost certainly wasn’t planted with the intention of letting it overgrow. But we’re grateful it has.

The flowers blaze like fireworks. Their petals shimmer like sparks.

Indeed, there’s such an assortment of blooming flora that they appear as if the shrapnel of a rainbow that exploded above to sprinkle the trees and ground below.

Butterflies flutter next to magpies. Pigeons coo from a coop that suddenly appeared on the garden’s edge a few weeks ago.

Our 4-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter climb the trees, something I worried they wouldn’t experience growing up in a megacity. They sit on branches bejeweled with blossoms.

We enjoy picnics, juggle devil sticks, toss Frisbees, strum ukuleles, kick (Chinese shuttlecocks) and even hide Easter Eggs among the wild flowers that roil across the ground.

This Easter, several curious grannies watched me stash plastic eggs packed with candy in tufts of ground blooms and crooks of lilac limbs.

I expect they wondered what on Earth this foreign guy was doing concealing colorful orbs in the “weeds”.

A group of children playing nearby decided to find out for themselves.

Once they discovered there were treats inside, I had to call my wife to bring our kids as soon as possible if there were going to be any left for them.

The, ahem, Easter Bunny, rather than Mom and Dad, still hides the eggs, as far as our kids know. Or knew.

Some of the children told Lily they’d seen me concealing the treats. She later told me she’d pretty much guessed my wife and

I are the “bunny”.

It was adorable to watch our kids and the local children dash around searching for the hidden treasures, especially considering the Chinese kids had most likely never joined one before.

And it was particularly sweet of the older kids to share their eggs with our 4-year-old, since he didn’t find as many.

Probably all of us have some kind of comparable hideaway, our own “secret garden”. Even emperors built summer palaces.

Since few people visit, we’ve used it as a refuge to simultaneously escape from our apartment and the risk of infection before the outbreak began to retreat.

And we likewise used it as a place to escape the sometimes gloomy feelings conjured by the uncertainty that clouded the outbreak’s early days, replacing a shadowy horizon, figuratively speaking, with the light of an actual sunset over the mountains.

That darkness has since essentially subsided throughout China.

But, indeed, a field forsaken by landscapers yet not flowers will remain the setting of our brightest memories during that gray time.

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