Sonali’s Garden – Chai Tea on a Summer Afternoon

Bismarck, North Dakota.

In November 2018, the weekly Travel Tuesday post featured a park in Bismarck known as Chief Looking’s Village. This beautiful park includes some walking trails and playground equipment typical of a city park anywhere. It also contains a beautiful and well kept flower garden. A plaque on one of the stones in the garden welcomes visitors to Sonali’s Garden. As I noted in that post, Sonali Seth was taken from life as a young woman. With much love, her parents built this garden in her memory and they keep it fresh and well cared for. You can review that original post I wrote here. In late June, that blog post received a comment from Dr. Vinod Seth. Sonali’s father suggested that I should share the post on Sonali Memorial Garden Facebook page. Visiting there, I came to meet Dr. Seth and his wife, Aruna. She promptly invited me and my wife, Lynn, to visit the garden, have some Chai Tea and watch the sunset. Schedules being what they are, we were able to connect as Lynn and I drove through Bismarck on our way home from this year’s Steiner Family Reunion in Colorado.

The garden is as beautiful this summer as it was last year when we first visited. There are several sections of a wide variety of plantings arranged around a walkway. A pergola and bench provides a shady spot to meditate in the warm sun and many benches provided by Sonali’s friends and family surround the garden providing lots of space for people to relax and enjoy the beautiful sunsets and the views of the Missouri River as it transits Bismarck.

On a beautiful summer day, I was obliged to capture the moments and take a few “people pictures.” First, a note of apology… I’m a landscape photographer, not a people photographer. In other words, when it comes to “people pictures”, I don’t know what I’m doing. In the photo above, from left to right, Lynn, Aruna, Vinod. We had a nice visit over tea and after our visit, I felt I got to know Sonali a little better. I am sure we will be visiting the garden again. The gallery of images below were random shots I captured at the garden. As usual, in most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.