The elegant informality of South-east Asian landscaping is easily adaptable in India.
Winter is the season when you wish you had your own house rather than an apartment, for this is when you can best enjoy a garden. Typically, Indian heat, especially in north India, leaves little scope for beds of flowers to flourish, though in more humid climates like Kolkata and Mumbai, and even in Bangalore and to some extent in Chennai, it is at least possible to have a fair degree of lushness and some flowering shrubs and vines going through the year.
“Our problem,” says Rahul Manchanda, landscape designer and gardening consultant with several projects in Gurgaon, “is that we have tended to follow the concept of the English garden developed by the British.” While this works well for official bungalows with their prescribed number of gardeners according to official hierarchy, for the average Indian home where both trained gardening staff is increasingly a nightmare, as well as for a semblance of year-round continuity (“imagine drying beds of flowers for their seeds, transplanting new beds of flowers for the next season and so on, all in a pattern of a tall hedge, herbaceous borders, clipped flowering bushes — it’s too much!”), Manchanda says the model we in India should be following should not be English but South-east Asian.
The South-east Asian garden has not found its spot as something that was specifically created at a given point, but as something that took amorphous shape as the region developed, borrowing and adapting across cultures and geographies in the region. Its most prominent influence is, naturally, Japanese, yet unlike the Japanese garden which, if anything, is even more formal (though minimal, as opposed to English excess), South-east Asian landscaping has less rigid guidelines. It adheres to some of the same principles, true, but tends to break rules rather than abide by them.
Chances are that water becomes one of the most dominant features in this landscape. Over the decades, this has been adapted in various forms: as ponds (“but you must not let the water become static”), streams (“the most creative, though it’s likely to be a monsoon season phenomenon in India”), decorative water bodies (“particularly, if you have garden sculpture and need a reflecting pool”) or, as is more usual, a swimming pool (“the most likely though the least creative since owners like the space around a swimming pool to be clutter- and plant-free”).
While stones are part of an English rockery too, in the case of the Far East (in particular) and in South-east Asia, this can be replaced by just the presence of a few large rocks (to represent the solidity or might of nature) or a spray of pebbles set in a formal pattern. What Manchanda feels is best avoided is a “sense of the expected” in even a small garden. “There should be a sense of curiosity, of adventure even,” he insists, “a garden should never appear tamed or the whole purpose is lost.” While it must not give way to wilderness, it should at least be allowed to “grow naturally”.
Increasingly, he insists, Indian homes are opening up to the idea that a garden is not merely another space to entertain guests, have parties. Instead, it should consist of undulating spaces, several of which come together to create a larger expanse of “meditative space”.
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However, the challenge is not merely in developing a garden but in integrating it with spaces within the house. This takes the form, says Manchanda, of calculating what you want to see when you look out of your windows. While the traditional view might be to use plants and shrubs according to height, so the tallest are the farthest from the window, according to Manchanda each window should offer its own set of views — perhaps one of a cluster of plants, another of palms dwarfing all views, still another just overlooking a free-range garden. Decks and porches and verandahs should be “overwhelmed” — his term — by greenery. “A garden should be allowed to enter the house,” the designer insists, “not the other way alone, of looking out over garden views.”
This is when you understand that Manchanda is likely a radical too. “You must not use pots or urns unless absolutely necessary,” he says — eliminating any chance of change of views constantly, and suggesting instead that the entire garden be planted, a sense of permanence being an important feature of such spaces. Such plantings are desirable not just at the farthest (where gardeners usually use them as screens) but also close to the house.
Balconies must have shrubs that have both grown up from the ground to come up to their height, as also their own individual collection of plants. No window should be denied a view — not even from bathrooms, or laundry rooms, nor — and Manchanda insists on this — servants’ rooms.
Some of the usual rules apply: leverage your plants so some or the other will always be in flower round the year; don’t fuss over alien flower beds (“you can always buy your geraniums and dahlias for cut-flower arrangements”); aim for maximum greenery that requires least maintenance; avoid — the vastu-wallahs will love this — cacti; have trees that will not block the sunlight else other plants, even grass, will not grow underneath; select garden furniture with care, not so much with parties in mind as much as for personal seating; and finally, a garden comes alive only when you have planned your elements to include something that other creatures will like — squirrels, birds, snails, earthworms.
Manchanda says large sculpture can be a distinguishing feature of a garden too, and it need not be merely spiritual, it can just as easily be abstract. But what, eventually, defines a garden is the way you use it. “Don’t let a garden be merely decorative,” he says. “Use it.”
