This is descriptive writing, and the two bullet points tell you exactly what will be marked: shades and contrast, and texture and light. Write 150–200 words in two or three paragraphs.
- Choose one garden and one moment — a particular morning, a particular hour. Light changes colour, so a description spread over a whole day loses its colours.
- Move in an order the reader can follow: ground to sky, near to far, or entrance to centre. Do not jump about.
- Use the shade names from page 92 instead of plain colour words — crimson, salmon, olive, pistachio, indigo, sky blue. This is where the vocabulary you learnt earns its marks.
- Add one comparison for texture per paragraph — petals like tissue, leaves like leather, moss like felt.
- Say what the light is doing in at least two places, because light is what makes colours contrast.
- Use the present tense for immediacy, and prefer strong verbs to piles of adjectives.
Sample answer:
The Company Bagh at seven in the morning is still half in shadow, and the first thing you notice is that green is not one colour but a dozen. The mown grass along the path is pale, almost pistachio, where the sun has reached it, and olive in the shade of the wall. Behind the beds the mango leaves hang dark and leathery, so deep a green that they look black until a breath of wind turns them over and shows the paler underside. Between the two runs a line of tulsi in earthen pots, dusty and grey-green, rough to the touch as flannel.
Against all this green the reds arrive like a shout. The old rose bushes near the gate carry crimson blooms whose petals are cool and thin as tissue paper, and beside them a bed of salmon-pink portulaca lies close to the ground, glossy and almost fleshy. The gulmohar has begun to drop scarlet petals on the path, and each one holds its colour for a day before it rusts.
The blues are the quietest and the last to be noticed. A cluster of small indigo flowers sits low under the hedge, so dark that they read as shadow until you crouch. Above them, plumbago spreads a washed-out sky blue that seems to have taken its colour from the morning itself. As the sun climbs over the wall the whole garden shifts: the greens flatten, the reds burn brighter, and for a few minutes the wet grass gives off a faint steam, so that the colours look as if they are still drying — a canvas of soil, exactly as the poem says, with the paint not yet set.