Gardens nurtured by love

By Carol Aloysius

‘This is my garden I’ll plant it with care
These are the seeds I’ll plant them with love
The seeds will sprout and grow up tall…

How often have we heard those words repeated to us by nursery school teachers while demonstrating to their students how to grow their gardens. As a child I remember one such experiment where our teacher took us to the school yard and kneeling on the muddy ground, explained to us the kind of things that plants needed to promote their growth - the sun, rain , air and good earth.

My gardener, W.G. Karunaratne’s love for gardening was instilled in him when he learned these verses in the catholic school he attended in a little village off Gampaha many moons ago.

This love grew stronger after he was sent to Colombo by his father a harbour worker at the tender age of fourteen, to work in a garden loving household.

“It was the lady in that house who was the real garden lover. Named after a flower, Daisy Nona, taught me everything I now know about gardening”, he tells me in one of his frequent nostalgic journeys into the past, while seated under the shade of a thambili tree during his afternoon break from work.

Garden

“ When I went to work in her garden, Daisy Nona told me that the first thing I should learn before growing a garden, was to pull out every single weed by its root and make sure the garden was clean and ready to be planted. She showed me how to loosen the soil to allow the plants to breathe, and to take care of the young plants by constantly watering them and nourishing them with natural fertiliser such as kohu and cow dung.

“ Never use artificial fertiliser or insecticide to kill snails or insects that harm the plants. A bit of salt is all you need”, she constantly reminded me. I still follow those golden rules, nearly fifty years on.”Ever since he became my gardener, Karunaratne has diligently applied those same rules to transform the once barren land abutting my into a flourishing garden of flowers and fruits. Under his magical touch, the land has sprung to life in a riot of gorgeous colours.

Pink and white roses, red anthuriums, red and white shoe flowers, pink, white and purple bougainvilleas, deep red and yellow ixora plants bordered the tall stately temple flower trees and palm trees. In between this wonderful mix are fruit trees such as papaw, lime, guava, thambili and mango.

“In a climate like ours anything can grow Nona.”, he told me when I asked him why I found it so difficult to grow anything .

“Try planting these vegetable seeds in pots, and see how easily they’ll grow, as long as you follow my advice” he challenged me, handing me some packets of bandakka, tomato and chilli seeds.

After fetching three empty pots he gave me the following instructions: “First mix in the soil with the compost manure.

Then water it lightly and plant in the seeds. Water the pots each day with a small watering can. Do this early morning before the sun comes up, and in the evening. And you’ll soon find your seeds sprouting”.

I followed his advice to the letter and was overjoyed when the seeds finally began to sprout. It was undoubtedly one of those few red letter days in my life I told him emotionally, and we celebrated it by drinking two young thambilis plucked off the very tree he had grown three years ago!

Often, while puffing on a beedi after a hard morning’s stint of gardening, Karunaratne would reflect on the much changed landscape of the city from the time he first set foot in Colombo, then a garden city half a century ago.

“Then” he would tell me with a faraway look in his eyes, “most houses had large gardens filled with fruit and flowering trees.

All the lawns were well manicured, with the whole family taking pride in trimming the hedges and mowing the overgrown grass.

Disappearance

There were fruits such as damsons, avocado, sour sup, naran, jak and breadfruit which now only grow in the villages. One family in whose garden I worked, showed me with pride a grape vine, which they told me they had brought by train all the way from Jaffna.

I remember walking down Havelock Park and Vajira road which were broad roads with many flowering trees and seeing hedges of damsons jambu trees laden with fruit and mangoes.

If you were to walk along these roads today, you will find instead, newly built roads and apartment buildings with hardly any gardens in between”, he laments.

As a nature lover he bemoans the disappearance of birds such as the house sparrow (ge kurulla) and butterflies that were once found in abundance in the city and insists that those who are garden lovers must try to cultivate even a small garden in their homes however limited the space. “Even if you have a postage sized garden or no garden at all, you can still grow some plants in it.

If you have only an indoor garden, grow plants that don’t occupy much space such as anthuriums, palms and ixora. Cultivate them in pots, or dress up your windows with plants.

You can even grow your own vegetables without harmful pesticides and weedicides in long wooden boxes or even small plastic containers.”, he says.

Every month when Karunaratne goes home to visit his family in Gampaha he returns with a fresh load of plants for me.

“These are plants I have nurtured in my garden at home. Share them with your friends, so that we can make this a city of gardens again”, he tells me.

He has already begun instilling his love for gardening in the children in my neighbourhood, who gather around him when they return from school to sing his favourite nursery rhyme:

“This is the seed I planted.
This is the tree I grew.
From seed to plant from plant to tree,
it will soon fill up the skies”.