My early memory of Sansevieria was about these plants being used as boundary markers or hedging plants in Kerala, where I lived. We had them at home, making an irregular boundary wall around our ancestral home. Noone knew who planted them, but they were there, and despite the neglect, months of dry, baking heat and […]
It will be November again soon, a time of the year that Arpita dreads. With Diwali around the corner, the annual crop burning cycle practised by farmers and the arrival of winter. A union of events that signal the toxification in Delhi’s air quality, leading to her asthma spiking up and unscheduled emergency visits to […]
The festival season is here. And this is the time when the role of flowers and plants become prominent in our lives. Truckloads of poinsettia start arriving in supermarkets in the UK and the US. Bag fulls of marigold and asters are seen piling up in markets around India and Asia. The fragrance of jasmine […]
Oh wow someone exclaimed as one of those innumerable Zoom meetings got underway. I was sitting in a room full of plants as I always do these days and it’s often triggered reactions such as this. These meetings then follow a familiar pattern where I am asked to provide a virtual tour of the garden […]
What does being a plant-parent mean to you? I find gardening very therapeutic. Its hard work and I love it. I’m still making mistakes, still learning. It’s a continuous process. Shifting the pots around, changing the arrangements is my favorite pastime. What stage in your life did you become interested in growing plants? What triggered […]
Like any kind of parenting – human, plant or pet, very few get it 100% right every time. We all learn to get better as we go. Having said that, here I was, priding myself on my green thumb, my pretty and healthily blooming flowers, my low failure rate with growing plants, etc, etc when […]
Succulents, once you understand them, are very easy plants to maintain. These desert/ arid land natives have evolved over time, to thrive in low maintenance, low water conditions. Give them too much and they are likely to show their displeasure. I learnt succulent-care the hard way – through trial and error, some heartache and some […]
Indian summers are scorching! No argument there. March, through June – until the rains come, it’s sweltering heat in most parts of the country. Most of us, our plant kids in particular, are looking for ways to beat the heat. This is just the time when plant parents need to pay extra attention to their […]
One of the prettiest flowering plants you can have is the Anthurium. The showy blooms come in a variety of colours and stand out in a crowd, quite literally. The Anthurium is not a simple flowering plant. It comes with a range of different types, colours, and beat this – more than a 1000 different […]
In most places in India, summer is already making its scorching presence felt! Temperatures have started soaring, and so, we are getting ready to experience that familiar ‘baking in an oven’ feeling. But wait…but there’s a natural alternative for beating the heat. Nature has provided us with wonderful indoor plants that bring down the temperature […]
