Shilpa Kapoor had barely moved into her new house in Port Blair when the lockdown was announced. The gregarious Kapoor found herself all alone, her husband had his duties, she had nothing to do. That is when she took another look at the garden adjoining her house, a neglected space, and turned her attention and energies towards it. “I have never had a plant with me, not even the customary tulsi. It had never occurred to me that plants would come to my rescue,” she recalls.
Kapoor began with a cutting of morning glory in a pot. As she watched it grow and flower, her fascination with green life took root. A total garden illiterate, she experimented freely, taking help from the internet occasionally and finding her way through trial and error.
Given the shortage of vegetables on the island, she thought it would be a good idea to grow them; and she grew little saplings from seeds collected from vegetables. Then, she realised the island soil was not very nourishing, and she dug a compost pit. Once, she saw her bell pepper saplings infested with ants. Taking an internet tip, she sprayed them with a cooking soda solution. “I may have gone wrong with the concentration because the leaves turned brown at the tips,” she says, recalling her rescue mission. She fed the plants with rice congee, a powder of discarded multivitamins, and whatever she could think of. As she looks with pride at the little peppers growing, she knows that she did something right, finally.
She sings and dances for her plants, and during the fortnight when she was bedridden with an injury, she got the household help to take pictures of her garden for regular updates. “I guess I have gone a bit crazy, but I know that there is no turning back now, even after the old life gets back on track,” she says.
This year has been one of learning and discovering. With the pace of life having slowed down, and people spending so much of their time at home, the home itself has become a place of discovery. Gardening has become such a craze over this year that in the Philippines they have even coined a word for it—“plantdemic”. It started with lockdown restrictions impacting supplies and people thinking of growing their food, and it has reached a level where people are now stealing precious plants from protected gardens.
The plantdemic may not have reached “criminal” proportions everywhere, but globally, there has been fresh interest in gardening, even if the garden means just a few potted plants on a balcony or window sill. There is a joke about the new normal of pandemic times when it is not surprising to be talking to your plants but to contact a shrink only when you think the plants are talking back. Well, for many gardeners, their plants have always conversed with them, in a distinct vocabulary that the gardening muggle does not understand. Now, though, many more urban beings are learning this tongue. “During the lockdown, I knew every new leaf growing on my plants. One can develop a relationship with plants in difficult times and they see you through,” asserts photographer Ambika Bhatt from Mumbai.
Archana Amaresh with her plants | Photo Courtesy Amrita Borah Nair
While new converts discovered the joys of chlorophyll and petrichor, the experts upped their skills, making homemade fertilisers or trying out terrariums and bonsais. Bhatt tried her hand at microgreens, and with her inborn artistic flair, has turned even these planters into eye-catching table pieces—the microgreens poking out of a bed of white pebbles, waiting to be plucked and strewn over soup and salad.
Padmaja Parulkar took her gardening love to a new level when she began composting kitchen waste. With so many restrictions on movement, she also decided to spend her time dabbling in garden art, painting Tibetan prayer flags on the walls behind her pothos collection.
Preeti Bhambhani from Bengaluru tried her hand at Kokedama, with the help of a friend who is a specialist in this Japanese garden form, where plants are grown in a tight ball of peat and moss, tied together with string. A new convert, she loves this growing style, which allows her to have a mobile garden.
For Bengaluru-resident Archana Amaresh, too, it was a surprising discovery to know she has green fingers. For her, it began with a stick of ajwain patta (Indian borage). She stuck it into a pot of soil and watched the plant sprout shoots and leaves, till it was a healthy herb ready for further propagation. Amaresh then found a discarded plant and “rescued” it. That, too, thrived and was ready for propagation, soon.
“Forget green fingers, I used to have black ones,” rues Arati Rajan Menon. “I killed every plant I touched, sometimes through neglect, sometimes by overwatering.” Then the pandemic happened, and for the first time in her adult life, Menon found herself homebound. She still does not understand how she turned from killer to carer, perhaps it was her more intensive engagement with her plants and their needs that changed the relationship.
For Reshma Varghese from Kochi, gardening has begun as a way to stem the restlessness of work from home. The plants the gardener tended did not have any connect with her, till she began sticking money plants into bottles and cauldrons. The hobby grew, and there is not a single spare vessel that has not been upcycled into a planter. And she believes she has been smitten for good. “I used to ridicule my parents for their habit of taking a plant clipping from anywhere they travelled,” she says. “Recently, we went for a holiday to Peerumedu, and here was I, actually taking a cutting myself.”
Now, as the world goes back to normal, many might not find the same time with their plants again. But as Bhatt says, plants are forgiving—even when you ignore them, they only do you good. “If you forget about a scrawny plant in a corner of the balcony and see it after a couple of months, some grow to thrice their size, some revive so beautifully, [and] you will be amazed. There is something about forgetting a plant and then finding it again—it is magical,” she says.