A wedding by the pool

With ethereal white paper flowers by the pool side.

 

A night at Nandi Hills

Here are some pictures of the trees and of the moth (?) that landed up at our hotel room doorstep from a night in November that we spent at Nandi Hills

 

The sunflower.. can anything be sunnier?

White carpet

 

The heady intoxicating aroma of the morinda tinctoria always puts me in a good mood. Is it the connection my brain makes to Manderley that makes it so?

 

11.03

Images of Mumbai from our trip in October 2013

Great shopping and some interesting road side eateries and restaurant eats is what I remember of Mumbai. And the sweltering sun.
We walked around the consulate area, Gateway of India, Colaba (with its many interesting shops), Marine Drive and the Queens necklace (where the trees grew at such an incline I thought they would fall), Chowpatty beach (where we got some vada pav), Juhu beach and the Bandra area (where our obliging taxi driver pointed out the houses of all the Bollywood stars). It was a vibrant couple of days that left me wanting for more.

 

New beginnings - in the Chennai garden Sept 2013

Cannon ball

Another exquisite cannon ball tree sighting.

 

Chennai Garden - August 2013

 

 

 

Golconda Fort in Hyderabad

 

Beautiful landscaped gardens

Husain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad

Kaikondrahalli Lake

One sunday morning in August we headed out to the Kaikondrahalli lake in Sarjapur. It turned out to be a really well maintained lake - there was a nice walking path built around it that we walked/jogged along. The views were splendid - of the water, the many birds, the high rises around. It seemed like much of the local community had come out for their morning walk as well.

 

 

I read later about the restoration of Kaikondrahalli and thought it to be a great example of how citizens can make a difference. Apparently the lake was restored a year or two back by the efforts of some local citizens, joining hands with the associations of the nearby high rise apartments and the local village community and the BBMP (city council). The restoration was done in a ecologically and socially sustainable manner, enabling many different bird species to inhabit the area around the lake, planting over 1000 trees, allowing the local villagers to wash their cattle in certain areas and having an area marked out for the children of a local government school to use as a playground.

 

 

 

Lalbagh Independance day flower show

 

It was that time of the year again - Aug and Jan, the Lalbagh Gardens puts up a display of flowers to celebrate independence and republic day.

This year the central decoration was a floral boat.

 

Here are some of the roses that caught my attention.

 

The beautiful coxcomb

 

The living wall

 

Produce from 'Garden City farmers'

Chennai garden - July 2013

Every time I go home, I find something interesting in the garden. This time, aside from the usual lovely butterflies, there was this little mango sapling that had come out of a seed that my mother had sown after eating off the fruit.

Chennai Marathon

some interesting sights while in Chennai for the marathon/10K

Indian Laburnum in full bloom on the way to the Leela to collect the bibs

 

View of the Adyar Poonga from the bridge across to karpagam avenue

 

Neem tree buds on the morning of the run

 

 

The run itself...

 

 

 

This tiny flower, no larger than my thumbnail, had dropped off a tree and almost formed a carpet along the sidewalk. I tried digging through 'flowers of india' to identify the flower/ tree but in vain; if you know what it is , please do leave a comment.

Update - thank you College Gardener! it is most likely the wrightia tinctoria.

 

 

Garlands being sold on adyar bridge

 

 

 

View from the new apartment

 

 

How green is my city?

Article from The Hindu, June 2nd 2013

“Free birdsong! Free flowers! Rains guaranteed!” No, this is not an over-enthusiastic billboard or sales pitch for a new-fangled instant solution to harried city-dwellers. Instead, this is a promise on an electronic tree on the website of Bangalore-based group Trees For Free. They’re talking about trees, of course. And they mean every word. Since Trees for Free began in 2005, the organisation — led by Janet Yegneshwaran — has been turning Bangalore greener.

Slowly, if significantly, urban afforestation efforts like Janet’s have established themselves across the country. Sapling drives are a common sight but more concerted efforts — involving research and planning as well as follow-up — are providing a fillip to the idea of cities with greater green cover.

One such group — one of the few that functions as a company — is Afforestt, a Bangalore-based group of ‘forest creators’. Since January 2011, Afforestt has been active all over India creating forests — many in urban settings — using a special method called Miyawaki. “It’s robust and effective and makes forests grow 10 times faster,” says Shubhendu Sharma, founder of Afforestt.

Other groups include Delhi’s Centre for Urban Green Spaces, which helps plan planting programmes through its Urban ReLEAF initiative; Chennai-based Nizhal, and Mumbai’s The Sapling Project. These groups have expertise and support and work at various levels: from creating and maintaining forests to allowing people to indirectly plant a tree through a signature or a click. But the focus is the same: greening our cities.

When it comes to cities — fast-expanding, growing denser by the day — just how green is green? The World Health Organisation’s guidelines say that bare minimum is about nine sq.m. of green open space per person. Many of India’s cities, as it turns out, manage to meet this minimum. Data from Census 2001 indicate that Delhi has about 21 sq.m., while Bangalore has 17 sq.m. Of course, that’s the bare minimum.

The figures don’t show that our cities are steadily losing their tree cover, thanks to infrastructure projects. “The first victim is the tree,” says Vanita Mohan of the Coimbatore-based Siruthuli’s, “especially when it comes to road widening.” Siruthuli aims to plant 1.5 million trees across the city.

Rapid degradation isn’t confined to bigger cities, observes Amit Bhatnagar, who founded the Rishikesh-based Plant a Tree India; he has seen it happen even in Rishikesh. “Just 10 years ago, much of the land was used for agriculture,” he says. “Now it’s a tourist’s city; tree cutting is rampant.”

Besides the shared sense of dismay at tree-felling to widen roads or build apartment complexes, another explanation for the growing interest in greening our cities through trees, suggests Shubhendu, could be technological. Rather than opting for lawns or other landscaping solutions, people are using the Internet to keep up with research — and they’ve figured out that trees and forests are the environmental workhorses, he says.

What does it take to create complete forests in cities? Shubhendu says urban soil is typically depleted of nutritious material. Before creating a forest, soil needs to be softened and prepared for planting by adding biomass. Having adequately softened soil, saplings are then planted using the Miyawaki method. Within three months, the roots penetrate a depth of one metre. Survival chances are then extremely high. To mimic a natural forest as far as possible, the soil is covered with a thick layer of mulch to conserve moisture and set off a natural cycle of water management.

Tree-planting groups have implemented projects at a variety of locations; from backyards at individual homes to police stations and even corporate campuses. Thinking of forests or sudden bursts of concentrated greenery in these distinctly urban settings might seem unintuitive but they are creeping up around the cities. What’s more, as anyone with the barest hint of a green thumb will remind you, a forest isn’t just a clump of trees; it is a complete ecosystem, buzzing with bees, birds, butterflies, and bats.

These green groups typically choose native species, ones that have typically done well in the cities. Neem, avenue (honge mara or pongamia pinnata), Kadubadami (tropical almond) are favoured. “Trees with berries — such as the jamun — attract a lot of birds,” says Vanita.

For all the biodiversity they attract, urban forests require a distinctly human caretaking. “Urban forests are fundamentally a human-dominated ecosystem,” write Pradeep Chaudhry, Kenjum Bagra and Bilas Singh in a paper on the green cover of India’s cities, published in the International Journal of Enviromental Science and Development in 2011. “The role played by human beings in the urban forestry environment is critical.”

Urban trees must weather a multitude of obstacles. In particular, roadside tree-planting activities — heart-warming as they might seem — might be limited to only symbolism, suggests Mumbai-based Shardul Bajikar, natural history editor of Saevus, a wildlife magazine. If the typically fragile saplings do survive, there is no guarantee that they will not soon meet their end in road-widening projects a year or two later before they become trees, he says.

So creating well-grown saplings is crucial to give them a “leg-up on survival,” says Bajikar. Obtaining high-quality and appropriate saplings is only one part of the problem. Once planted, saplings need constant monitoring and, of course, regular watering. If commitment to watering and other maintenance is not built-in, the initial enthusiasm can die an early death. “Most initiatives fail in summer because the saplings are too young,” he says.

Given these challenges, even with urban planting initiatives, the way ahead may simply be to avoid felling trees, he says. The rhetoric of ‘Felling is okay, as long as replanting is done’ falls flat because it takes a good 15-20 years for saplings to grow into trees and provide the benefits of a full-grown tree. Unless, of course, you’re looking at a protected area, like a mangrove or nature park — “Urban places you’re sure development won’t reach”. One success has been the Mahim Nature Park in Mumbai, formerly a city corporation dumping ground. “It literally is a forest that rose over a heap of garbage,” Bajikar says.

Pictures from my mother through the last two months