Senior citizen Padmini Sinha leads an ordered, disciplined life but when it comes to her garden, she strikes a discordant note. No neatly planted exotic plants blooming prodigiously amid expanses of perpetually green lawns. No hybrid varieties to enhance the garden’s beauty. That’s because creating gardens that look like nature is not good enough anymore. It’s time they also began to act like nature. And hence the trend of biodiverse gardens is gaining popularity with gardening enthusiasts and landscape consultants alike.
Currently plants in urban gardens, private or public, are chosen for purely ornamental reasons. Chennai-based landscape consultant K Hariesh laments this practice started from the trend of “synthetic gardens”.
“Low maintenance plants which do not have pest/diseases, low water requirement, low sunlight demand and great tolerance to physical abuse are preferred. Almost all such species do not flower, and so there are no butterflies, insects or birds. Natural pollinators like bees, who ensure the food supply of many species including humans, need nourishment from nectar and pollen and many hybridised flowers do not provide enough of either,” he says.
“Growing a diversity of plants, especially native species, is a better way,” he adds.
Biodiverse gardens essentially consist of plants suited to conditions on site and can thrive with minimum intervention and form mutually beneficial relationships with other plants and animals. In large open spaces, planting can imitate natural relationships in four layers: canopy, understory trees, shrub and groundcover.
Indrani Krishnier’s garden is “nature guided” and not “nature tamed” and kept as close to the wild (or real) side of nature as possible. “I have always been drawn to local varieties of flowers and our garden has different species—chemparuthi, kanakaambaram, nitya malli creepers, nandhiyavattai, shankupushpam, even the erukkam poo, which is considered a weed generally but attracts lot of carpenter bees,” she says.
“Also, fruit-bearing papaya, mango, custard apple, coconut and banana trees alongside the naturalised Cannon Ball tree with its delightfully fragrant flowers. Birds, insects and squirrels have a right, too, to share oxygenated green space and I believe in minimum interference,” she says.
In her garden in Chennai, Padmini Sinha, who has “seen many kinds of gardens across the world” confides, “I do like order in my life, but not in my garden. A careful selection of plants in my garden adds to its character. They don’t need much maintenance, only a little sensitivity to basic needs—light or shade, and minimum watering. The shade of my lovely Indian Badam tree does not allow for many flowering shrubs but helps raise families of koels and woodpeckers each summer.”
She adds, “Lots of sunbirds frequent the wild ixora and night jasmine clusters and compete with squirrels in drowning out my voice on a telephone call. At present, I also grow organic vegetables for my kitchen on my terrace.”
Organic farming expert Raghavendra Rao says, “Within available space, we can combine different species of plants like herbs, shrubs trees, seasonal weeds, mosses and ferns. And organic practices ensure gardens filled with flowers, fruit and dancing butterflies, sweet bird calls and the hum of bees.” A M Malathi, an avid gardener who also runs a private detective agency says, “Why worry about grasshoppers, when you can use bio-control measures such as small birds like wagtails who can eat up to 18 of them in a day. And hybrid varieties are a no-no because I don’t want to tamper with the natural life cycles.”
Renowned botanist, Dr Narasimhan, seems to have the last word when he says, “Citizens and local bodies need to make conscious choices for greening. The danger lies in the penchant to veer towards the “different” and exotic. We need more thoughtful gardeners, particularly in urban areas.”
Biodiverse gardens then seem to be the way forward by being green expanses that feed the earth and the soul.