Growing vegetables in Heaven

Kashmir is a beautiful state of fertile valleys, rivers and lakes surrounded by mountains so steep, high and snow-capped that it looks as if a child has drawn them. So often has it been called Heaven on Earth that this is now almost an official title. Sadly, its disputed borders (involving India, Pakistan and China) have meant that travellers visit at their own risk.We were there last weekend, and came quickly to accept how fitting is that Heaven on Earth title. I will write soon on the magical seventeenth century Mughal gardens cut into the hillsides of the Kashmir Valley, and currently undergoing major restoration.

The main line of work in Kashmir is agriculture, and we saw a fascinating example of this, in the floating vegetable gardens and sunrise markets centred on Dal Lake in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Vegetables have been produced on islands in the lake since at least the time of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.

Many of the vegetable plots are located on artificial islands, their soil supported on reed rafts and enriched by composted pond weed. Vegetables including radishes, carrots, onions, cauliflowers and turnips, plus brightly coloured flowers, are all cultivated on these floating plots; during the rains, the small-scale farmers turn to melons, peas and squash for their ability to clamber up supports and away from the risk of rot in the wet soil.

Floating gardens on Dal Lake, 1881, image from the splendid site http://www.searchkashmir.org

One of the floating plots today.

Every morning at sunrise the farmers gather on the lake in their narrow boats (known as shikaras) and sell the produce they have harvested. When we were there, there was something of a glut of kohlrabi, but it was still magical to see the boats gliding quietly through the water, the brightly coloured vegetables and flowers laid out for purchase.

By 6.30am the sales for the day are complete and the little boats slip away.

The work is no doubt hard – and are there are increasing worries about the impact on the lake of encroachment and soil run-off from the many vegetable plots. Yet at sunrise among the shikara-wallahs and the local farmers it was difficult not to feel we were indeed experiencing Heaven on Earth.

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Of spice and tea

As someone who came to the study of landscape history from a love of flowers and gardening, I write surprisingly little about horticulture. So, to make amends, this whole post is about some of the plants we saw on our recent trip to the southern Indian state of Kerala.

Up in the Cardamom Hills, we toured a delightful spice plantation (apparently the one featured in Monty Don’s TV programme Around the World in 80 Gardens). Our guide not only showed us the plants, but let us taste and smell and feel the spices, all of which were grown organically. We often struggled to guess what they were, given how unfamiliar we are with the plants that produce even well-known flavourings.

The cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao) is not native to India but thrives in the Kerala climate. Its flowers and the chocolatey beans grow directly from the trunk.

These are the young flower buds on a clove tree (Syzygium aromaticum).

Ripening coffee beans. Although not native, coffee has apparently been grown in India for centuries.

Cardamom flowers and seeds are produced at ground level on a large herbaceous perennial (Elettaria cardamomum).

Workers harvesting black peppercorns, which grow on the vine Piper nigrum.

One of the ornamental plants grown at the spice plantation, this is Thunbergia mysorensis, commonly known as the ladies shoe plant or clock vine. It is pollinated by sun birds.

The holy cross orchid, Epidendrum radicans, which is commonly grown in Kerala.

While much is changing at a frantic pace in India, many traditions around spices remain, and they are still usually sold loose, scooped from open baskets into paper packets. The smell of the uncovered spices in large markets, such as the one in Old Delhi, can be almost overpowering.

Indian spice market, c1875. Image from 19cphoto.com.

The spice market today in Old Delhi.

Many of the hillsides in Kerala are covered in a single plant – camellia senensis, the tea bush. It is native to parts of India, but apparently was not cultivated commercially until we Brits arrived and, in typical colonial fashion, brought in other Europeans to establish and run large tea plantations. The climate in Kerala is perfect for tea production and the young buds and leaves can be harvested more or less throughout the year, which means constantly clipped shrubs cover the hillsides like vast mad parterres.

Tea plantation near Thekkady, Kerala.

It is easy to take evocative photos of the female tea pickers with their baskets and colourful clothes among the bright green plants, but the work is slow and hard and the conditions sometimes murderously grim. As with the spices, practices do not seem to have changed much in two centuries, although sometimes now the pickers, instead of pinching out the tips of each branch, use scissors to collect the young leaves. Certainly when we were taking these photos, all we could hear was a gentle snipping sound.

Tea pickers in Kerala today.

Tea pickers in the 1880s. Image from oldindianphotos.in

India today is the world’s biggest consumer of tea, most of it drunk as the splendid sweet, milky version known as chai, which is boiled up in vats in every Indian market, often flavoured with cardamom, and sold in little cups for a few rupees. One of the less appealing signs of progress is that the cups used to be made of clay, and would be discarded after a single use, gradually to decompose back into the soil. The practice of throwing them on the ground remains today – but the little cups are now plastic, and are strewn as litter in every Indian town.

An Old Delhi chai-wallah at work.

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Two empty plinths

The death of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher last week has led her supporters to cast around for ways to commemorate her. Ideas include a statue in some central London spot, perhaps outside the Houses of Parliament, or on the empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. This would seem to me a bad idea, not just because Thatcher remains a highly divisive figure whose life many would not want to see celebrated, but because Trafalgar Square’s empty plinth already has a role.

The plinth was originally destined to display an equestrian statue, to accompany figures of Lord Nelson, two generals and a king, but it was never installed. So from 2005, the plinth has exhibited a series of specially commissioned artworks in a splendid scheme run by the Greater London Authority. The idea is both to make Trafalgar Square a vibrant public space, but also to “encourage debate about the place and value of public art.”

It has been a great success, allowing the display of (so far) five artworks, all different, some controversial. None of them would have been chosen in a soulless, lowest-common-denominator competition for a single, permanent piece. I don’t much care for the current display (a bronze sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse by Elmgreen & Dragset) but know that it is only temporary, and that the next one may be more to my taste (well, unless it does turn out to be of Margaret Thatcher…).

Here in New Delhi, we have our own empty plinth in the heart of the city: on the great ceremonial procession known today as Rajpath, and built by the British even as their control over their Indian Empire was waning. In 1936, Edwin Lutyens designed a white marble memorial to the late King-Emperor George V, to be erected close to the war memorial known as India Gate.

The memorial to George V, complete with statue; photograph from Irving’s Indian Summer.

After Independence of course, the Indians did not relish having a British monarch lording it over this great thoroughfare and eventually his statue was removed. Since the 1960s it has sat rather glumly in a park to the north of the city, once the site of major British pomp and ceremonies, but now little known.

The statue has gone, but Delhi’s plinth remains, sheltered under its fine baldachin or canopy, but resolutely empty.

There have long been arguments about what or who might replace old George on the plinth, but even obvious contenders such as Mahatma Gandhi have proved too controversial for plans to proceed. It has often struck me that Delhi might follow the example of Trafalgar Square and invite the best of Indian artists to produce a rolling programme of temporary installations for this most prominent spot. It would be a great shame if London’s novel example, rather than being replicated, were now to be lost.

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Lunch with the Galloping Gardener

One of the pleasures of blogging is the people you get to meet – both virtually and in person. I was delighted a few days ago to lunch with Charlotte Weychan, the Galloping Gardener, whose delicious blog needs no introduction. She has established a hospital near Udaipur and was in India to check on progress.

We met at the delightfully-named Tikli Bottom guest house, an hour south of Delhi, and were treated to lunch and a tour of the garden by British owner Martin Howard. It was all just mustard fields when he first saw the plot, but under his care it is now full of beautiful native trees and shrubs, a small formal garden, an organic veg plot, a cutting garden and, when we were there, some cute local kids who took something of a shine to Charlotte.

Charlotte was charming and gossipy but sadly swore me to silence on some of her juicier stories and scandals from the UK gardening world…

Like Charlotte (and indeed Tikli owner Martin), I have found India has drawn me towards charitable work and, when not researching historic landscapes, I am managing to squeeze in some time working with NGOs. One of them is Asha, a impressive organisation that is transforming hundreds of thousands of lives in Delhi’s slums. Asha celebrates its silver jubilee this year and I have found myself doing everything from co-curating a photography exhibition at the India Habitat Centre, writing much of the text for a book, organising its launch with ambassadors and senior business figures – to chatting with slum kids and their mums, and buying Christmas decorations for a kids’ party !

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A lake garden

This is Kesar Kyari Bagh on Maota Lake, part of the Amber Fort complex near Jaipur. It was created around 1600 for the women of the harem to admire from above. According to Tom Turner, there was also an ingenious pulley system that allowed the women to reach the garden directly from their rooms, thus avoiding the risk of inappropriate male contact en route. The name translates as the saffron-growing garden, as originally it was this plant that grew in each star shape. The changing climate apparently means that saffron will no longer grow.

Some scholars call it the Maunbari garden and argue that it was designed to be viewed at night, the pale marble partitions standing out in the moonlight like a pattern of lace against the dark plants.

What I love about about this garden is its triumphant artificiality. Nestled below rugged hills, it is striking because the whole thing is so obviously, gloriously man-made, from the dammed lake, square platform base, and stepped terraces to the intricate stone work and patterned planting. To anyone who argues that naturalistic designs are always to be preferred to “the Checks and Restraints of Art” – I’d simply show them Kesar Kyari Bagh.

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The Rock Garden, Chandigarh

It started in 1965 as an illegal development on protected forest land.

Its creator was inspired by Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in the city of Chandigarh, yet what he produced is folk art that stands in extraordinary contrast to Corbusier’s modernist city. For the first ten years of its life, it was entirely secret, its existence known only to the lowly government worker who was behind its painstaking creation. Today it hosts thousands of paying visitors every day, and the site and its creator receive countless awards and regular international press coverage.

It is made entirely of reclaimed, reused and recycled materials.

The creator of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, Nek Chand, is now 88 but continues to develop his extraordinary site in the heart of this northern Indian city. We visited on a rather murky day just before Christmas. Throughout the 10-hectare garden, space is used in sharply contrasting ways, from almost oppressively narrow, steep-sided lanes and tiny Alice-in-Wonderland doorways…

to large, confident waterfalls and open terraces.

Its range of recycled materials is astonishing, from old bricks, foundry waste, broken pots, pieces of tile, crockery, bangles and pebbles to oil drums, bakerlite (plug covers), rags, bike frames, wire, rainwater and human hair.

Phase three, still under construction, seems to me perhaps less successful than its predecessors, with a vast open plaza that offers camel rides, a toy train, swings, and other standard tourist attractions. But the ranks of small folksy sculptures, for which the Rock Garden is perhaps best known and which cluster on terraces and shelves throughout the site, have a character and charm difficult to define but easy to appreciate.

The whole experience of visiting the Rock Garden is extraordinary, disorientating and deeply impressive. And, of course, although these photos are chosen to make it seem that we enjoyed its charms in seclusion and quiet contemplation, just as its creator did for the first ten years of its existence, these days its international fame means it is always packed with curious and appreciative visitors.

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Early Mughal myths

Ask a garden-lover what they know about Mughal gardens and the likelihood is that, pretty soon, they will say something about them being paradise gardens, a foretaste of the celestial Paradise that awaits the faithful. Garden historians will probably add details about the geometrical four-square design, divided by waterways representing the rivers flowing with milk, honey, wine and water described in the Qur’an, and enclosed within walls that protected them from the wilderness beyond.

All these features may well have appeared in Islamic gardens over the centuries, and elements of them are certainly to be found in some gardens created by the Mughal dynasty that ruled India from 1526 to 1858. But research I have just completed illustrates how the designs of Babur, the first Mughal emperor, bore little relation to this traditional view of the gardens that his dynasty produced.

Idealised portrait of Babur, c1605, from the British Museum.

I will be giving a paper on this topic at a conference in Brussels next week, organised by the European Architectural History Network. My talk will focus on the wider surroundings of Mughal gardens in the brief period between Babur’s conquest of northern India in 1526 and his death four years later. (The talk will also explore similar issues in contemporaneous gardens of Renaissance Europe, but that may be a topic for another blog post, another day!).

Babur, born in modern-day Uzbekistan in 1483, was a direct descendant of both Timur (Tamberlaine) and Genghis Khan. A poet, musician and creator of gardens, Babur was also a great warrior and conqueror, his life full of shifting military alliances and treachery, full-blown battles, skirmishes and sieges throughout much of central Asia. Fortunately for us, his life story is wonderfully captured in his autobiography, known as the Baburnama.

Although a great source of information, the Baburnama is also (through no fault of Babur’s) the cause of much confusion and misunderstanding about early Mughal gardens. Some sixty years after Babur’s death, his grandson (the third Mughal emperor Akbar) commissioned a series of paintings to illustrate the work. These exquisite miniatures, many of them portraying the gardens Babur describes, reflect more the designs of Akbar’s time in the 1590s, than they do the actual early sixteenth century gardens being described in the text. They show us walled, geometrical gardens with flowing waterways dividing the space into four equal squares. They represent how we see Mughal gardens today. Eminent contemporary writers such as Penelope Hobhouse have used the paintings to conclude that Babur’s designs had the “four-part layout, divided by water rills, with a central pool.. typical of early Paradise Gardens.”

Babur receiving envoys in his garden at Agra, image from the V&A.

But a close reading of the text tells us something quite different. The Baburnama reveals the first Mughal Emperor’s love of nature, his delight in plants and creatures, and the way he lived most of life in the open, resting in gardens, setting off from gardens, navigating past gardens. These places were central features in the landscape, points of reference for Babur and his fellow military travellers. Gardens were both refuges from attack and vantage points from which to attack. They were places of beauty and of power, where the Emperor would entertain and impress allies and envoys, plan campaigns and celebrate victories.

Babur’s gardens were often created at the site of an interesting natural feature – a spring perhaps, or a river, or a fine view – and then pools, plantings and seats or pavilions would be added. For several of his gardens, Babur’s descriptions focus on the “good air” or the “first-rate view” from the site. It is clear that these places were not separate and enclosed, but designed to enhance nature and to be part of it. Certainly, Babur tells us about the flowers and fruit he planted, the flowing waterways, his great love of regularity and symmetry, but there is no insistence on a four-square pattern or on four rivers. He writes of his great thankfulness to his god for what nature has provided, but not at all of the garden as a symbol of celestial Paradise. Instead these first Mughal gardens were the Emperor’s stamp on the land very much in the here and now, a sign of his love of nature, and also an expression of his control over the territories he conquered.

Today they also serve as a warning to us landscape historians not to get carried away by beautiful images, but to research a range of sources before pronouncing on the style or meaning of a particular site or type of garden.

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Ruined love…

... or why we should(n’t) put the nose back on the Sphinx.

The Great Sphinx, photographed by Henri Béchard, c.1880.

The merits -  or otherwise – of historical conservation was the subject of a splendid debate last week at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Delhi.

In one corner was Sam Miller, BBC man and author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, who argued in favour of a gentle sort of conservation that quietly shored up picturesque ruins, preserved only what was genuinely historical without replacing lost elements or incorporating new additions, and that paid full regard to the importance of personal memory and nostalgia. In a sentence, his position was perhaps that old places should feel old.

In the other corner was Ratish Nanda, project director at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, who contended that the original intent of the creator was the most important factor in preservation, and that on occasion it was appropriate to use traditional skills and materials to restore a site to its original state. In other words, old places could be best served by becoming new again.

The recently restored Humayun's Tomb.

The main example both men discussed was the area around Humayun’s Tomb, a sixteenth century world heritage site in Delhi, where Ratish Nanda has been leading a major programme of conservation. His work has been criticised for ‘too much use of the paint pot,’ with formerly crumbling Mughal buildings becoming suddenly dazzling white and red. He showed us a number photos to illustrate the work he has been doing (drawing some gasps of horror from the journalists in the audience):

One of the buildings in the Tomb complex before restoration (left) and after.
Image from the project website.

It was easy to sympathise with those who chorused the restored buildings looked too bright, too new, too like images (as Sam Miller said) on a chocolate box lid.

An archway before restoration...

...and afterwards. Both images from the project website.

But Ratish Nanda explained that years of substandard restoration work to the buildings – often using cement – had led to waterlogging, structural cracks, and corrosion. After extensive research, his team had removed the ill-advised materials, and uncovered and repaired many original features. Nowhere had been painted – the bright whites and reds were coloured plaster which exactly replicated how the Mughals themselves had first decorated the buildings. After two or three monsoons, the colours would soften and start to look more mellow and appropriate. But Ratish had resisted calls for the plaster to be made ‘biscuit’ coloured from day one, as white and red was the authentic scheme.

Sam Miller maintained his position that such extensive restoration was a kind of fakery. At the very least he argued that any new materials or repairs should be clearly marked, so that people knew what was original and what was contemporary work. Ratish Nanda agreed that, in some cases, simply preserving what was left would be the best option. But so much of Humayun’s Tomb had survived the centuries, and it was so significant a site and so well-documented, that full restoration in this case, he argued, was the most appropriate action.

After all this discussion and dispute on Humayun’s Tomb, the two men did agree on one thing: neither of them would put the nose back on the Sphinx.

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Lutyens’ Mughal Gardens

Today we visited the sumptuous Mughal Gardens that lie behind the President’s Palace (Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi. Normally private, the gardens are opened free of charge to the public for just a few weeks every February and March, when flowering in the gardens is at its peak. [Sadly, for security reasons, cameras are not allowed, so I am using images from other sources for this post.]

Aerial view of the main part of the Mughal Gardens, with the palace in the background. Image from India Perspectives Vol 24.

A successful mix of Indian and European influences, the fifteen acres of gardens were laid out by Edwin Lutyens, the British architect who designed the palace itself and much of the surrounding colonial city of New Delhi in the 1920s and 30s.

Plan of the Mughal Gardens, from Irving, Indian Summer.

As this plan shows, the gardens divide into three areas: first, the grand section immediately behind the palace with its lotus fountains and spectacular stepped geometry. At the other (western) end, there is a more private butterfly garden around a gentle circular pool and, joining these two together, is a long narrow walled garden, edged on both sides by tennis courts, and planted with roses and bougainvillea.

Lotus fountain and flower beds in the main garden, January 2010, from the Aga Khan Visual Archive.

The circular pool, in January 2010, from the Aga Khan Visual Archive.

Pergola and rose beds in the narrow walled garden, from the Aga Khan Visual Archive.

Lutyens was famously not a fan of Indian architecture (or indeed of Indians). He described the former as “cumbrous, ill-constructed… the building style of children” and dismissed the latter as “odd people with odd names.” With such views commonly held, Lutyens and the other Brits involved in the creation of New Delhi debated how far Indian influences should be reflected in the design of their colonial capital. For the palace gardens and other landscape features, the issue was coloured by two important books published during the time New Delhi was being built, and both probably deliberately seeking to influence the debate in favour of traditional Mughal elements: first, Constance Mary Villiers Stuart’s Gardens of the Great Mughals, published in 1913; and second, Indian Gardens [Indische Gärten], also by a woman, Marie Luise Gothein, which appeared in 1926. Certainly Lutyens’ original plans for an artlessly planted English-style garden behind the palace were to change dramatically.

The plan he finally produced for the site, inspired by gardens he had visited in Agra and Kashmir, reflected the pleasing geometry and balance of Mughal gardens, their beautiful stonework, and the plentiful use of water in rills and fountains to divide the gardens into quadrilateral patterns. These ideas were to some extent a natural progression for Lutyens from the arts and crafts style he had established in his English designs, such as the delightful garden at Hestercombe in Somerset. To these Mughal influences at the palace gardens Lutyens added two very British lawns designed for entertaining, and many large geometric flower beds usually described as English in style (although originally many Mughal gardens would have had similar masses of colourful flowers). To provide year-round structure among the flowers, the main garden is punctuated by clipped specimens of the fragrant native maulsari tree (Mimusops elengi) and by columnar cypress.

An aerial image of the palace shortly after it was completed, showing the new gardens in the foreground, as part of the grand axis along which New Delhi was being constructed. Image from the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.

British garden historian Tom Turner (whose wry blog at Garden Visit I highly recommend) has been critical in the past of these gardens. In an article in 2005 in Historic Gardens Review, he wrote disparagingly of the inappropriately coloured tiles in the pools, the spotty old-fashioned planting and the poor standard of maintenance, citing leaking basins and obtrusive plant supports.

Many of these issues seem to me to have improved since 2005. Today I saw no sign of leaks and very few plant supports, and the flowers, while traditional in choice, were spectacular in colour and range (although the pool tiles did perhaps still have something of the swimming pool about them).

My one big criticism of these gardens would be that, apart from the sandstone pergola in the long walled garden, there is a decided lack of shade. The trees in the main garden are too fastigiate or too clipped to provide any meaningful shadows, and elsewhere there are only low flowerbeds and lawn. Even today, before the Indian summer has really begun, it was too hot to linger for long among the garden’s delightful fountains, flowers and intricate geometric patterning.

The shade-giving pergola in the walled garden. Image from Irving, Indian Summer.

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Two memorials for the Mahatma

It was 64 years ago today that Mohandas Gandhi (known as Mahatma, the great soul) was murdered by a Hindu extremist, who believed Gandhi had been too sympathetic to the Muslim cause during the British withdrawal from India.

Delhi has two Gandhi memorials, one the site of his cremation at Raj Ghat, in a park on the banks of the Yamuna river where several other Indian leaders have since been commemorated, and the other at Birla House, in New Delhi, where he was shot.

I visited both places with friends last week, seeking to commemorate Gandhi quietly and away from the grand ceremonies that today will mark the anniversary of his death.

The site at Raj Ghat (literally the riverbank of the king or leader) was designed by Vanu G. Bhuta, an American-trained Indian architect who won the Government-sponsored competition to create a suitable memorial to Gandhi. His was a stark, modernist solution, intended to reflect the profound austerity of Gandhi’s life. The design, which was completed around 1956, is a square, sunken garden, surrounded by walls that serve as viewing platforms. In the centre of the garden is a raised, black marble slab, decorated solely with an engraving of the phrase “He Ram” [Oh God], supposedly Gandhi’s last words, and an eternal flame burning in a large lantern.

Originally the surrounding garden was red earth, but it has been changed several times since its installation and is now British-style grass punctuated with trees planted by visiting foreign dignitaries (from Queen Elizabeth II and Dwight Eisenhower to Ho Chi Minh).  When we visited last week, we admired the proportions and scale of the garden, and the way it can be experienced first in a broad sweep from above, and then intimately (and barefoot) at the memorial itself. The bright marigold petals add a typically Hindu touch (and on occasions the whole memorial is smothered in patterns of flower petals). For me, however, the dignity and repose of the space were somewhat spoilt by the bright green matting laid for mysterious reasons over many of the stone paths, and by the retractable barriers that discouraged visitors from getting too close to the memorial.

The second Gandhi memorial in Delhi is at Birla House, where Gandhi was shot. It is now a national museum, known as the Gandhi Smriti.

I had read of the footprints cast in stone marking his final walk from the house to a planned prayer meeting. But the reality was disappointing: the footprints were not, as I had imagined, gently sunken into the earth, as if preserving the exact tread of his final few steps. Instead, they are oddly raised and too numerous to bring much poignancy to the site  -  and apparently any child who sees them as an invitation to walk in Gandhi’s footsteps is quickly disabused of the idea by the museum guards. The whole site seemed to me slightly dispiriting: I’ve written elsewhere about its surfeit of information boards, and the much-trumpeted interactive displays in the house were one of the strangest museum experiences I have had.

For me, the memorial garden at Raj Ghat, ideally shorn of its bright matting and barriers, is a far finer way to commemorate the founder of the Indian nation.

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