Bangalore Bouquet

When I was uprooted and transplanted from Delhi to Bangalore, I was excited about the move. I did the usual (maybe not so typical for me) housewifely things such as decide the house we'd be living in, picking out the furnishings and so on.

Dh had been making a few trips to Bangalore and had shortlisted a few probables among the houses for me to check out. When I saw this house, I knew it was 'my house'! Just as I had chosen all the houses I've lived in in the past.

I was told that the previous occupant of the house was a single American gent, who like other single American gents, had more time and interest in techie innovations than gardens and lawns. Thats so NOT true, given that I know at least one single, very American gent who not only bothers about what he grows and how!The most attractive feature about the house was not the delightfully quiet street or the near continuous canopy of trees above or even the absence of open trash receptacles around it. It was the palms! Glorious luxuriant palms which obviously had taken years to grow and had been just left to do so.



The palms got me. But the palms also showed up the lack of any other form of healthy vegetation in the patch of dirt around the house. We set about righting this wrong earnestly. Overnight we got hundreds of potted and other plants in and arranged them in the freshly laid organically rich beds.

And grass! It has been laid so many times that I fear that by now it must have acquired a reputation for promiscuity!

Most of the initial tranche were foliage plants except for the odd (can you fathom I don't fancy them?) anthuriums, sadabahars (they are so ubiquitous they are called Graveyard flowers), poinsettia (now what exactly is the flower there?), and of course the already present sampige.

Then I picked up many roses from Lalbagh apart from doing what came easiest to me- rushing to Delhi and getting Chrysanthamums, Calendulas, Gerberas, Dahlias et al from my favourite haunt there at Rajdhani Nursery in Jorbagh. Some of them plants took root, put out luxuriant foliage but stopped at that. No huge prize winning flowers.

Gradually I learnt to come to terms with the fact that I was NOT in Delhi. And that I should learn to love the flowers of this garden city. There was this balled compound flower, in various shades of orange and red, which no self-respecting Bangalore garden could be without (I still haven't found out the name of that one!)

But always there were hibiscus! What a variety of them...