Gardenia Sentiments: Beautiful Leaves, Fragrant Flowers - Get One and Grow It Now

"Gardenias bloom, gardenias bloom." The gardenia symbolizes strength and eternal love. At the winter solstice, a gardenia holds a single flower bud waiting to open, and by the summer solstice it will still blossom. The longer the budding period, the longer-lasting its fresh fragrance. The leaves of the gardenia tree also stay green and unfading through wind, frost, rain and snow year after year.

I sat at the table, and in this slightly cool midsummer, I gently opened the window. A breeze blew in, carrying a faint fresh fragrance that brushed against my face. I opened my eyes, and it was once again the season when gardenias bloom. This gardenia tree is the most beautiful memory that accompanied me as I grew up. In my childhood, every interesting thing was inseparable from this gardenia tree.

In the year I was born, this gardenia tree first arrived, coming to the large round flowerbed in front of my home. From that year on, the area in front of my home became lively. Every evening, after each household had eaten dinner, people would stroll lazily from their homes to this large round flowerbed with the gardenia, sitting there chatting and laughing. The elderly talked and laughed heartily, while the children played and chased each other below the flowerbed. What an enviable way of life, how comfortable life was. My grandmother especially loved gardenias too, and she even named me "Shao Zhi."

Whenever my grandmother had free time, she would go to the large round flowerbed and carefully tend to the gardenia, treating it just as she treated me. She was very worried that the gardenia flowers would fall off. During a typhoon one day, my grandmother kept watching the gardenia tree from inside the house, afraid that the frail thing could not withstand the wind and rain. In the end, she could not hold back any longer, put on a raincoat and straw hat, and ran outside to cover the gardenia tree with a plastic bag.

During my middle school years, I was a very rebellious child, often getting into conflicts with classmates. Every time I came home from school, I carried a defiant anger in my mood. I walked up to the gardenia tree and punched and kicked it. One gardenia flower fell, like a paper airplane, lightly and slowly landing in front of me. I bent down, and in the process of bending, it was as if I followed the path along which the gardenia had fallen, smelling its fresh fragrance, which made me, someone who had previously had no interest in gardenias, begin to feel something for it. The fresh fragrance of the gardenia calmed me at once, and at that moment all I wanted was to enjoy this scent.

Over the more than ten years of my growing up, whenever the flowers bloomed, I would come to the round flowerbed to enjoy the floral fragrance.

"What are you doing here?"

I, with my eyes narrowed, was startled, and that shout pulled my soul back from the gardenia. It turned out to be her: long hair, a thin and small figure, chubby cheeks. She was my wife. That was our first meeting.

"You like gardenias too?" "Yes! This gardenia, that fragrance, it really is enchanting."

From then on, she and I came to the large round flowerbed every day, and our love story began.

Gardenia. My lifelong romance. Gardenia, my inextricable bond with gardenias.