Creative gardener utilises 12-cent plot to create green haven
CHENNAI: Haseena Jabbar forgets everything else once she steps into her garden. For this 35-year-old, gardening is a medium to explore her creative side. She has utilised every inch of her 12-cent plot at Kottarakkara in Kollam to create a green haven.
“Availability of land is the only thing that is holding me back. Of the 12 cents, I just have three or four cents to indulge the gardener in me,” said Haseena. So, instead of doing things that gardeners who have lots of land at their disposal do, Haseena decided to tap into her creative side.”I love to create new things from items that we consider as waste. An old washbasin, pot used to collect toddy and old vessels – all can be transformed into beautiful flower pots,” she said.
She was very interested in green leafy plants earlier. “The glossy look of the leaves in different shapes and sizes held me in awe. Creepers, climbers, aquatic plants, air plants and hanging plants occupied every nook and cranny of my garden,” she said. However, after she became part of some gardening groups on Facebook and came across beautiful photographs of flowering plants, Haseena began growing them too.
“Today, I have 30 varieties of table roses besides other flowering plants,” she said. She began receiving queries regarding the sale of plants after she posted pictures of her garden. “The sale is seasonal. During summer, the table roses get a good price and sell at around Rs 450. The plants that move a lot during the rainy season are the green leafy ones like Sedum,” she said.
According to her, the best variety to plant in the rainy season are water lily and greens. “Besides decorative leaf plants, I also have a small vegetable garden,” she said. Yet again, there is a difference in her veggie garden. “I grow a variety of amaranth, brinjals, chillies and root vegetables,” she added. Her vegetable garden has amaranth locally known as pal cheera, sundari cheera, mayipeeli cheera and pressure cheera. Though people approach her to help set up a garden at home, she doesn’t take up outside work since she neither has the time nor the energy.