Floral Abundance at SVC
Sri Venkateswara College has been subject to a lot of expansion and construction over the last 35 years. Stretches of ridge lands on which the institution stands have now been tamed into a larger canteen with stone clad seating areas for teacher and students, a library block, extra teaching rooms, more staff quarters, hostels for young men and women, bamboo rooms in two sections of the college requiring more levelling of the gound, extensions in the science block, expansion of the Arts Block and the adminisrative section, an auditorium shell and a new teaching block named after Durgabai Deshmukh, concretised parking space for vehicles, badminton and tennis courts, electric cables, generators, and the most recent of them all, a walkway from the metro gate to the centre of college, leaving us with shrinking grounds over the decades.
Besides the miniature temple, very much a twenty-first century construction is a small patch of land bordered with a few rain trees in front of th administrative block. For long it showcased a few foundation stones, announcing new sites under construction inaugurated by important digntaries. Members of the garden committee spent long years in shifting away the commemorative foundation stones.
When the stone slabs and the cement frames holding them were gone, the ground was levelled to plant pink roses bushes that quickly filled up the space and flowered profusely, providing an abundant source of flowers that were collected for worship. Eventually, the rough demarcation between this green patch and the path leading to the grounds was identified by two concrete borders, on either side of a tarred road separated by two concrete boundaries that marked off the green spaces. The rose bushes looked scraggly when not in bloom. The small plot outstretchd itself and and took on new avatar. It was chosen as a site for rainwater harvesting. Then grafted roses were planted instead of the local variety and they did rather poorly. The whole area looked like wild scrubland. Eventually, the grafted plants had to be painstakingly repotted and relocated and we had a whole new canvas to work upon.
We bordered the patch with ruellias (mexican petunias) in pink, white and mauve colours..and slowly prepared the gound for flowerng annuals. The rain tree shrubs formed the backdrop and salvia, daisies and calendulas were planted in stretches. A few marigolds and tagetas also found some space. Closer to the wall hollyhocks ranged themselves in and around the rain-trees. Alysiums in purple and white charmingly brought up the groundswell next to the ruellias covering up the edge ofthe border.
The annuals are now in full bloom. It is now a balmy spring and the nighs are still chilly, allowig the flowers a riotous interlude. Soon the heat will be on and the flowers will slowly disappear. It takes six months to create this wild floral canopy, every season. Our gardeners contracted for this work, work hard, nurturing the plants and replanting those that have died or have been damged by animal and human footfalls. This stretch has filled up uninteruptedly with annual blooms, almost 15 years after the stone plaques were removed. Perhaps in the next season, more varieties of flowers will join this vibrant stage and add to the festivities. Who knows?
