“It isn’t there any more! It’s gone! They’ve built on it!
These words sent shivers down my spine and the sense of loss was overwhelming. I should have known it would happen eventually.
It was happening all over Maadi. Huge buildings going up everywhere. The one thing she had so dreaded might happen after her death had indeed come to pass. Her beautifully cherished garden no longer existed.
I was newly back from England, where I had been told that my old friend Saffeyah Moyeen had died at her daughter’s home in Berkshire some time before. She was a lovely English lady married to an Egyptian who had given up his diplomatic post in order to wed her. They had made a home together in Maadi, settling in a charming house with the air of an old English countryside rectory.
I had been hoping for a chance to visit that garden again. I decided to make some enquiries, and it was a young man at the community center who broke the news to me. Where once had been a garden, now stood a huge apartment block.
It is not my intention to go into the motives for this on anyone’s part, but rather to express my gratitude for hours shared with Saffeyah in that garden, memories of which abound.
It was many years ago now that I and a Canadian friend started walking Saffeyah’s horse with her in the early mornings. When my friend left for Canada, I continued. In those days the little rubbish carts pulled by donkeys were the only traffic at that hour. I would get up at 5 am and walk to Saffeyah’s place, enjoying the wonderful song of the bol-bol, a beautiful native bird of Egypt, sounding not unlike an English blackbird. The clean fresh morning air, scented with blossoms of Camelsfoot trees or Jacaranda was invigorating.
Passing her long garden hedge, I could hear the frogs chattering on their lily leaves in her lovely pond. I would go in at the back entrance by the stable, to find Saffeyah already up and about. Together we did the old mare’s feet, brushed her down and put on her head collar. Saffeyah’s adopted street dog Hazel would be waiting with her collar and leash.
One of us led the dog, the other the horse. We always let the mare decide the direction. She had sensitive feet and some roads were uncomfortable for her. She was a very dark chestnut, and the pink Camelsfoot blossom looked so pretty tucked into her brow-band. Saffeyah had bottle-fed her from a tiny foal. They were devoted to each other, and the animal would make it known when she wanted to return home.
Usually though, it was when the traffic started that we returned to Saffeyah’s place, where we left the mare in her flower-shaded day pen with food and water.
That done, we went to the kitchen for fresh bread, home-made marmalade from Saffeyah’s orange trees, gamoosa cream, and tea. We sat under a massive bougainvillea, with great clusters of red and purple and white, to enjoy our breakfast. Here we would chat about this and that, happy things and sad alike. It was at these times that she would voice her fears for her garden after her death.
That hour spent with Saffeyah, set me up for the day. For that I will be eternally grateful. It was a little heaven on earth, an acre of cool green grass, trees of numerous variety, some very rare and irreplaceable, flowering shrubs, and Jasmine climbing the pillars of the house. Along one side, there bloomed a huge flower bed, a multitude of varieties and colors.
Saffeyah was known for her delicate paintings. She not only painted with oils and watercolors, she used her garden as a canvas, her flowering plants, as her paints. It wasn’t just a feast for the eyes, but for the soul as well.
Amidst all this color was the delightful bird song. She was a great bird lover, as we know from her book “Bim Bim about her parrot. But wild birds too were fed and watered or nursed back to health in her garden. It was a haven for them and she was delighted when the bee-eaters arrived in their swarms to deck her trees with even more color and fill the air with their characteristic soft trilling cries.
She loved not just her own trees but all trees. Years before she had fought alongside others to save the great Eucalyptus trees along the canal street in Maadi. I have heard her berating sleepy young policemen for lighting a fire against the trunk of a tree.
She also loved Egypt, especially as it used to be when she and her daughters could ride across clear, undeveloped, open desert to the Moqatam hills before breakfast.
Sadly, I fear this loss is not an isolate one. The spread of the city south, the rise in traffic, the clamber for land on which to build, all have taken their toll. How many other beautiful houses and restful gardens have gone or are earmarked for destruction, one can only wonder.
For all those in the Maadi Treelovers Association of which Saffeyah was a leading spirit, her garden was the culmination, the crowning glory of the annual tree walks; a place of refreshment and delight that is no more.
I like to think she has maybe taken it with her to wherever her soul rests now.
