A peek inside one of India’s most beautiful gardens

To Suresh Jairam, artist, art historian and curator at 1 Shanthi Road Studio Gallery in Bangalore, being in the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens is the closest a city-dweller can come to the experience of shinrin-yoku — Japanese for ‘forest bathing’ or absorbing the atmosphere of nature. He considers Lalbagh a botanical cosmos unto itself, his own personal ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. In his new book, Bangalore’s Lalbagh: A Chronicle of the Garden and the City, Jairam leads the reader on a gentle walk through the history, geography and significance of one of India’s oldest gardens, both to himself as a child and lover of the city, and of the garden to a city itself constantly in flux.All along the watchtowerHe believes that as a garden, Lalbagh is truly unique, both as a public recreational park, and one of Asia’s top botanical gardens. Speaking from a dimly lit corner of 1 Shanthi Road, surrounded by friends and visitors to the ongoing art show titled ‘at the kitchen table’, Jairam feels Lalbagh has it all. “240 acres with water bodies and monuments and a nearly pre-historic rock formation,” he says. “It carries the legacy of Kempegowda and Tipu Sultan who both built watchtowers there, and just such an incredibly diverse variety of plants, flowers and trees: over 1,000 varieties of trees and shrubs, and many of the trees are over 100 years old.” medium86682806Lalbagh, he writes in his book, is the “culmination of more than one trajectory of aesthetic and economic function”, and it’s been a hub for botanical diplomacy for hundreds of years. The “first seeds” of the garden were sown by the feudal ruler Nadaprabhu Hiriya Kempegowda when he established the city of Bangalore, complete with a network of integral tanks, in 1557. medium nocaption86690599In the 18th century, Hyder Ali, the nawab of Mysore, was the “first to demarcate the initial boundaries of Lalbagh”, built in the rectilinear Persian Charbagh or “four gardens” style, based on the four gardens of Paradise as described in the Quran. Jairam narrates how Hyder Ali, a staunch believer in Sufism himself, noticed the pilgrims that flocked to the nearby Masjid-e-Meraj Bada Makan mosque and its adjoining well, and wanted to provide them a place of rest.His son, Tipu Sultan, was a lover of gardens too, and botanical exchanges were high on his list of diplomatic priorities. Jairam narrates the anecdote of the ill-fated ambassador Muhammad Dervish Khan, who was sent to France to bring back knowledge of European technologies, and also a variety of European plants and gardeners to tend them. His ship successfully brought back seeds of flax, raspberries and strawberries. During his reign, Tipu’s diplomacy added great horticultural variety to the gardens at Lalbagh. medium86682820But it was with the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799 and the arrival of the British that Lalbagh truly came into itself as a botanical hub, or as Jairam describes it, “another node in the imperial botanical enterprise”. A botanical advisor to the commissioner of Mysore was tasked with locating a suitable spot for a horticultural garden to conduct economic botany, and Lalbagh in Bangalore was chosen for its temperate, conducive climate and fertile soil.Jairam smiles as he mentions how the British were petrified of the mosquitoes that infested the area, and hastily brought in and acclimatised the Cinchona plant from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, to Lalbagh. This plant was used for the synthesis of quinine, one of the only known cures for malaria at the time. medium86683946A horticultural delightKew-trained horticulturists like John Cameron, GH Krumbiegel, HC Javaraya, and MH Marigowda “were part of the larger colonial enterprise of re-working the landscape” and were brought in to plan and maintain the newly enlarged and freshly walled Lalbagh. Under these horticulturalists, Lalbagh soon became the repository of the country’s largest variety of trees, flowers and plants.It was at the behest of Cameron that Lalbagh’s iconic Glass House, meant to symbolise the colony and erase the legacy of Tipu, was built. Krumbiegel was responsible for the serial blossoming, or “the curation of flowering trees [that ensures] one or the other is in bloom through the year” creating a “perpetual spring in blur”, that Bangalore in general and Lalbagh in particular enjoy. medium nocaption86690677The result is a garden that’s never the same, replete with natural and man-made botanical variety, that bears visible testament to its own history. A horticultural delight, it’s also a paradise for bird-lovers, who can reliably be seen in the early morning hours, which Jairam also says is the best time to visit the garden (“before 9.30 am, when the tourists start coming in”).large86908809A self-confessed flaneur of nature, one of Jairam’s earliest memories in the garden is contained in a photograph of himself, his mother and his sister, taken by his father, 50 years ago, when he was just five years old. A regular visitor to Lalbagh all of his life, given that he grew up in a house just 700 meters away, he believes that some of his interest in researching the garden was triggered by his heritage, “formed by [his] ancestry of Thigalas — a community of locals farmers and gardeners”. The book’s account of Lalbagh is inextricably linked to Jairam’s personal experience of documenting it, and the book bears all the hallmarks of an art historian’s attention to detail, delicacy and beauty. A walk to rememberHe says the idea of writing the book came to him while walking through the garden with a friend. “It’s like The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Every time you walk through it, you remember a new story, like that of the bittersweet apple tree they called ‘Rome Beauty’, which was side-lined for use only in apple cider vinegar or as a souring agent when the Shimla apple became available all over India, or the time a tiger supposedly escaped from the [now-defunct] zoo! My friend told me I should write all these stories down in a book, so I gathered the research material I had collected over the years, and used the two lockdowns and the feeling of missing my walks in the garden to write about it.” medium nocaption86690748To him, a morning without a walk through Lalbagh is like a morning without coffee: simply messed up. “It’s my spiritual real estate, a space where I’m totally lost. This is where I find all my treasures of nature, where I’m most happy, as an artist, historian and citizen of Bangalore,” he says. Jairam has some essential advice for visitors to Lalbagh. “Climb up the granite hillock [known as the Peninsular Gneiss], it's one of the oldest rock formations in the world, nearly 3,000 million years old.” He turns ponderous when he recommends, “Stand at the top and take in the panoramic view of a city bursting at the seams, constantly changing around the garden.” medium86682853“Don’t pluck flowers or destroy anything growing naturally, but most of all, don’t go on a blind walk through Lalbagh. Indulge your senses: smell the flowers along the flower trail, it’s a veritable dictionary of perfumes. Watch the butterflies migrating, and listen to the birds. Revel in this haven, lose yourself and be romantic.”large86908809Read also: 85447342