The green house/nursery at the botanical garden as seen through a window of the dilapidated store house...
The green house/nursery itself does not house many plants, but the space around it has a very impressive variety of medicinal plants. Most of them growing outside their assigned pots/beds wild like weeds... The culprit according to Mr. Guddadamatha, labour problem!
The gnarled twisted branches of an age old yellow laburnum have over the years become a part of the wire fence...
The few plants inside the green house/nursery are making a valiant attempt to survive.
Old pals, growing together for, I wonder how many years...!
A yellow laburnum and a rangoon creeper entwined all over the wire mesh.
The bright ocher-green roots of an orange (mango tree) orchid, spread all over the trunk of this more than fifty year old mango tree.
I loved the whole feel of this frame. The colours, the textures... sumptuous...!
I loved the whole feel of this frame. The colours, the textures... sumptuous...!
Peering through the quaint little hand-made gate behind the store house...
An interesting find...
The ever-faithful cloth bag that carries my regular photo-jaunt supplies- A bottle of water, a small box of multi-grain biscuits, a hand towel, a pen/pencil, a small notepad/folded sheet of paper, a hair clip (To fix back my crazy hair when it sometimes gets impossible to manage) some money for emergency and without forgetting some SOS medicine... :)
Another very interesting find. A window display to die for... A made-to-order super aesthetic composition that made my day...!!
Looking through the rusted gate onto the lovely wooded grounds of the Botanical Garden...
And then the man himself... Mr. Guddadamatha
The early morning session at STTF got canceled and before the coordinator there could finish saying, "Have a good day Ma'am..." I had landed up at the Botanical Garden peering among the overgrown grass n' broken pots...
It's of course sad to see the run down state of the small warden's office and the green house, or what's left of it... The store/tool room was a brilliant study in rust n' old wood, maybe not opened in ages and the identification labels on the trees all faded and mostly broken... Ironically to me, the dilapidated surroundings offered a plethora of aesthetic opportunities, waiting to be framed... And for a whole hour-and-a-half I lost myself in the lush greens of the grass and leaves, hoary ochers and siennas of ancient twining vines and broken garden pots, powdery umbers and rusted oranges of the grills and wire-work around...
And then I met Mr. Guddadamatha, the warden of the Botanical garden, an extremely resourceful, helpful n' patient gentleman. He's been working there since 1968...!! According to him, the botanical garden grounds, an almost forty acre lush wooded area, of which we've hardly explored a minuscule portion, is actually a treasure trove of medicinal plants and many a rare variety of tree...! He was amused n' intrigued to see the pictures I'd taken of the old twisting vines, rust n' old wood, and wondered why I wasn't shooting the typically "beautiful"(as he termed them) pictures...
On knowing about my interest in all things green, he very patiently took me around and introduced me to the extremely interesting medicinal plants around the dilapidated nursery... There was a plant with a remedy for almost every ailment you could think of...!! Many I recognized, but there were many many more that I'd never ever seen or even heard of...! There was a tree, whose leaves are used as a substitute for tea, a tree that released an oil that smelled exactly like lavender oil... Oh, the list is simply endless...! Mr. Guddadamatha, the good man that he is, has invited me (And anyone else who's equally interested) over again with more time to spare and of course armed with a thick notepad and my camera battery well charged. He's promised to take me on a tour of the whole grounds. And guys, you wont believe it, I've even managed to get him to allow my kids to be a part of the Tree-tagging event after the rains...! WOW and double WOW...!! What an excellent opportunity that would be for my me and my kids...
No comments:
Post a Comment