Gilt-edged garden

by Amit Roy

INDIA’S CREATION AT CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW WINS MEDAL

IT IS worth returning to the sub­ject of the Chelsea Flower Show for the second week in succession.

This is partly because the Indian garden, designed by landscape art­ist Sarah Eberle to celebrate the British Council’s 70th year in India, won the prestigious silver gilt prize.

The council’s director in India, Alan Gemmell, clearly loves gardens. Right after the Chelsea Flower Show, he was off to see the one created by Claude Monet in Giverny, a village in Normandy, which inspired his paintings of the water lily pond.

What also caught my eye at the Chelsea Flower Show was a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) poster promoting its campaign to “grow the next generation of gardeners”. It featured a young Asian boy.

Perhaps the RHS, founded in 1804, can do more to encourage Asians to become members – it cur­rently costs less than £50 for a year’s membership. This allows access to 195 partner gardens and students get in for £10.

It seems to me that Asians are natural-born gardeners. As a child growing up in India, I remember even the poorest home would have a potted tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflo­rum) plant, which Hindus regard as both medicinal and holy.

In Assam, where I was born on my maternal grandfather’s tea and paddy estate, my grandmother would occasionally fetch a fresh pineapple from the front garden. In Patna, the Bihar capital where I began my schooling, we had access to guava, mango and lychee trees.

Perhaps in the UK, every Asian home could grow dhaniya (corian­der), the most fragrant of herbs.

This year, the RHS began work­ing with the NHS at the Chelsea Flower Show and remains commit­ted to continuing the partnership in 2019 and 2020. After the show, the “RHS feel good garden” will be relo­cated to the Camden and Islington Foundation Trust where “patients and staff will be able to enjoy the Chelsea Garden for future years”.

Sue Briggs, director general of the RHS, said: “We passionately be­lieve that everyone should have ac­cess to gardens. Getting our Chel­sea Gardens living on is a core part of our Greening Grey Britain Cam­paign to transform grey spaces to green spaces for the nation’s health and for the environment.”

Prof Tim Kendall, NHS national director for mental health, added: “The therapeutic value of spending time gardening and in green spaces is increasingly recognised... patients and their doctors are looking beyond medicines and traditional treat­ments, to a range of activities, including exercise, gardening and nature.”

It was the Indian physicist turned botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), who not only discov­ered radio waves ahead of Marconi, but was also the first to put forward the notion that plants have life.

The English may be the world’s most passionate gardeners. But the holistic attitude to all life, including plants, goes back thousands of years in Indian culture. The India garden at the Chelsea Flower Show includ­ed the Himalayan blue poppy. I once visited an institute in Dharamshala, the home of the Dalai Lama since 1959, which conducted research on Himalayan plants used for medici­nal purposes.