How Bengaluru's traditional gardens have adapted to a busy city landscape

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Spring has arrived in Bengaluru and flowers are everywhere—on trees, in parks, in flower markets, in nurseries, at traffic junctions, at wedding venues in different colours, shapes, sizes and fragrances. This is no longer the garden city I grew up in.

Roads, multi-storeyed buildings, apartment complexes and concrete infrastructures have gobbled up private land. But miraculously, the gardens have survived. They live on in different spaces—they have flown up into terraces and balconies.

They have spread out in corporate and apartment complex gardens. Hotels have landscaped gardens and so does the airport. Cubbon Park and Lalbagh have nurtured their old flowering trees, which have come from different parts of the earth, and created special gardens for flowering plants.

Lalbagh has two flower shows a year, which attract huge crowds. Also read: Seek out the good bacteria in your kitchen Bengaluru with its hill station-like climate and fertile soil has always been conducive to gardening. And with changing times, gardening patterns too have changed.

In traditional South Indian home gardens, flowers were not the main focus. They grew in between vegetable gardens and fruit trees and were specifically meant for puja and for adorning the hair. The flowers that were cultivated then were usually native species.

The reigning queen has always been the jasmine or mallige which grows even today in the surviving gardens of Bengaluru. Crossandra (kanakambara) and champaca (sampige) continue to be cultivated mostly in nurseries. The varieties of the ubiquitous mallige like Mysore mallige, jaaaji and multi-ringed jasmine, grow in pots in terrace gardens.