Day 362: Flora's Empire

Sanskrit literary texts abound in references to more worldly gardens: the great epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, and courtly dramas such as Sakuntala and the Ratnavali. In Tulsidas's telling of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita first meet in a garden “so rich in bud and fruit and flower that in its abundance it put to shame even the trees of paradise." Commonly there is a dualism between the pastoral beauty of an Eden-like wilderness and the lushness of palace gardens. The forests where Rama, Sita, and Lakshman spend the years of exile are idyllic natural landscapes, with shady trees and flower-strewn riverbanks on which they weave garlands to their hearts’ delight. In contrast, Ayodhya, from whence Rama has been banished, and Lanka, to which Sita is abducted by the wicked king Ravana, are both described as garden cities. Here the natural is transformed into kingly gardens full of stately trees, orchards, and flowers, with lotus-bedecked ponds and man-made tanks.

The royal garden is above all a place of seduction where flowers speak the language of love. The Buddhacarita, a poem of the first century C.E., pictures the young prince before he forsakes the world entering a pleasure garden with its beautiful lotus ponds, flowered pavilions, and lovelorn women. One of the women entreats him to look about him at the trees, flowers, and birds, each of which signifies desire in some way. Buddha resists all enticements, but the story is typical of early medieval Indian courtly culture in exemplifying a View of “courtship as a combat which takes place in a garden." The Kamasutra prescribes the type of garden considered essential to the royal household of the Hindu prince. It should have densely shaded bowers, flowering plants, and a swing; above all it should be secluded, protected against prying eyes. Here men and women retire to indulge in amorous adventures. Courtly dramas pick up the theme of the pleasure garden, often with convoluted plots of misunderstanding, disguise, and eavesdropping until the lovers are at last united. Poets frequently describe courtcsies between people of rank by means of floral similes -thus the folded hands are like lotus buds, the gestures of the eyes  like garlands, and words of praise like offerings of flowers. The human form, too, is similarly analogized: “Like the lotuses and flower buds . . . human limbs in their ideal state were to be smooth and tautly expanded, or blown like the tender and succulent growth of new plants.”

Just as Sanskrit texts link the plant world and the erotic, so, too, Persian influenced literary texts of Muslim India are “redolent of flowers." James Forbes quotes “A Song of Roshan, or Roxana,” which details the repertoire of sexually stimulating plants: “The sofa of my beloved is decked with garlands of mogrees, overshadowed by a canopy of jessamin. I have strewed it with the sweet dust of Keurah and perfumed it with ottar [attar] of roses; I am scented with the oils of lahore, and tinged with the blossoms of hinna; haste then, my beloved, to thine handmaid, gladden her heart by thy presence.” A deserted woman reproaches her lover: “The gardens and groves, once the fond retreat of thy Selima, afford me no pleasure; the mango and pomegranate tempt me in vain! The fragrance of champahs and odour of spices I no longer enjoy.” Sanskrit, Persian, and Deccani poetry as well extolled the sensuality of the garden and its appeal to all the senses: scent above all, but also sound, sight, and even touch.

Islamic gardens did, however, differ from their counterparts in Hindu India. Just how profoundly we do not know, since there are no precise descriptions of the gardens that preceded the series of Islamic invasions that began just decades after the Prophet’s death and culminated in the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century. We know what was in these gardens and what took place there (if literary sources are to be believed), but not how they were laid out, nor how their design might have changed over time, independent of foreign influences. Babur, the first Mughal emperor and a passionate gardener, set the tone for future commentators with his dismissal of India as dreary and unpleasant, its gardens without order and without walls. The Muslim tradition, in contrast, is the heir to the Greek in its love of order and logic. “Islamic gardens—like their buildings—are regimented into lines of perfect symmetry; balance and design is all; nothing is left to impulse or chance.” They are as alien to the Indian environment, William Dalrymple insists, “as the Brighton Pavilion is to the English south coast, or the Chinese Pagoda to Kew [Gardens]. Outside the garden, all is delightful chaos; inside, reflecting the central concept of lslam, spontaneity is crushed by submission to a higher order.” 

A garden created for such pleasures during one’s lifetime was often reconfigured after death, the mausoleum taking the place of the pavilion at its center. These gardens consciously invoked the Quranic imagery of Paradise, with its four intersecting rivers, as the aspiration for the departed. When Hindu rulers borrowed the concept of the memorial garden and its cenotaphs, as they did, for example, at Orchha and Mandore, it required some theological tweaking. Since Hindus cremated their dead there were no tombs, and since they believed in a cycle of reincarnation there was no promise of Paradise endoded in the garden. What remained was monumental architecture set off in a glade of flower and shade—mausoleums without bodies.

The zenana or purdah garden was a realm apart. It was probably the first garden to come inside the fort or palace; initially Mughal gardens in India had been freestanding entities, often ranged along a riverbank. Rajput and other Hindu rulers adopted the zemma and with it a garden exclusively for the women of the harem, their closest male relatives, and their numerous attendants——a gilded cage where women might pass their entire lives. Fanny Parks, traveling throughout northern India on her own in the 1830s and 1840s, probably knew the zenana and its secrets better than any other European. The four walls of the garden, she explains, must be of such a height that no man standing on an elephant can peer over” them. There were fine trees and flowers, a fountain with fish swimming in it, and a swing, “the invariable accompaniment of a zenana garden.” She adds, “The season in which the ladies more particularly delight to swing in the open air is during the rains”. Larger gardens, such as that of the palace of Lucknow, had tanks for bathing, and sometimes even a “montagne russe” to slide down or meadows for horseback riding.
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How Does Your Garden Grow?

Fortunately the Victorians were an instructive lot. Garden books, journals, and nurseries mushroomed in the nineteenth century to feed an ever-growing appetite for guidance. At times gardening took on attributes of a bloodsport, so fierce were the debates between partisans of different styles. The rage for bedding-out—starting tender plants in greenhouses and then setting them out in neat beds in patterns that resembled carpets——dominated the midcentury. This provoked a vehement reaction in the name of “naturalism,” spearheaded by William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. They favored hardy perennials or semiannuals set out in herbaceous borders, along with rock and water gardens drawing on the many exotics that could adapt to the English climate without coddling. At the same time, some garden gurus promoted a return to the formalism of Italian gardens with their statuary, terraces, and topiary. Manuals devoted to gardening in India remained largely apart from these squabbles, only distantly reflecting the changing fashions. One, dating from 1872, approved the rather garish color schemes typical of carpet bedding, but of course in India the plants had no need to be started in hothouses. A later manual recommended William Robinson’s English Flower Garden “as a reward once one has mastered the abc's” of gardening, declaring, “it is the most instructive book in the world in English.” Agnes Harler, author of The Garden in the Plains (first published in 1901), had also clearly absorbed her Robinson and Jekyll, offering chapters on rockeries and water gardens. She suggested that a formal garden was best suited for very small compounds without room for wide lawns or spreading trees; however, she cautioned against herbaceous borders, noting that they are ill—suited to India's lower elevations, where only a few perennials do well and even these refuse to bloom all at the same time to produce the desired color effects.”

The most popular manuals on gardening in India went through many editions and covered the whole gamut of topics. They provided detailed chapters on soils, temperatures, manure, watering, drainage, tools, growing from seed, grafting, pruning, transplanting, potting, kitchen gardens (best kept out of sight), noxious insects, lawns, and conservatories, along with designs for flowerbeds adapted from England and the continent. They advised how to create a spacious feeling even in a modest compound (mass shrubs and strongly colored flowers farther from the house; keep the garden simple and uncrowded) and stressed the importance of making sure that the view from the spare bedroom wasn’t onto “decaying cabbage stalks or servants hanging out the wash”—plant a little lawn under the windows with a bed of cannas or a flowering shrub or two, or a screen of climbers “to hide backyard activities.” One of the most popular offered plans for larger or smaller spreads that were simply English plans adapted only slightly to Indian conditions.

~~Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India -by- Eugenia W. Herbert

Day 175: Book Excerpt: Darjeeling- The History of The World's Greatest Tea

The northeastern section of India hangs like a limb between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, and Myanmar (Burma), a lazy-T-shaped expanse connected to the rest of the country by a slender 125-mile-long strip of land called the Siliguri Corridor. (Colloquially, and more evocatively, it’s known as the Chicken’s Neck). Stretching to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, Assam—now the area’s central state and, until recently, the name for the entire region—is largely at low elevation, hot, and tropical. The mighty Brahmaputra River cleaves Assam in half with a four-hundred-mile-long valley as it slithers southwest toward the Bay of Bengal. Altering its path and shifting its braided strands from year to year, the river widens to a dozen miles in places.

In 1823, Robert Bruce, a Scottish adventurer, explorer, and businessman, was trading along the upper Brahmaputra Valley when he came across indigenous tea growing in the dense jungle. Local Singpho tribes pickled the leaves and ate them with oil and garlic and sometimes dried fish, much in the manner of the Burmese dish lahpet, which is still popular today. The Singphos also made a primitive tea with the leaves.

Bruce befriended a Singpho chief named Bisa Gam and made arrangements to get some tea seeds and plants. But then two events interceded. In 1824, the First Anglo-Burmese War opened in response to Assam’s being largely overrun by invading Burmese. That same year, Bruce—by then a major in the Bengal Artillery—died. His story ends abruptly, and the thread gets taken up by his younger brother, Charles Alexander (C. A.) Bruce, who was commanding a flotilla of gunboats in the area.

The younger Bruce, evidently tipped off by his sibling before he died, got ahold of the tea samples. Exactly how is not clear. One version says Gam delivered the samples to C. A. Another claims that Gam came to pay respects, found Bruce’s younger brother, and passed him the tea. A third relates that C. A. retraced his brother’s steps and met with the chief, who presented the younger Bruce with several hundred plants.

With Britain’s unquenchable thirst for tea, C. A. Bruce suspected the impact of this discovery could be immense. He sent the samples on to the East India Company’s man in Assam, who, in June 1825, forwarded the packet of leaves and seeds to the Company’s botanic garden for verification.

The Calcutta botanic garden was the Empire’s nursery. It had been established in Sibpur, across the Hooghly River and just around the downstream bend from Calcutta, in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd. Using his own private garden as the foundation, Kyd conceived the new initiative “not for the purpose of collecting rare plants (although they also have their use) as things of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury,” he explained in his initial request for funding, “but for establishing a stock for the disseminating [of] such articles as may prove beneficial to the Inhabitants [of India], as well as the natives of Great Britain and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national Commerce and Riches.”

Coming on the heels of the 1770 famine that killed some 10 million Bengalis, about a quarter of the population, Kyd meant to improve Indian agriculture with better food crops. This was the moral imperative for the gardens. But Kyd also appealed to the Company’s mercantile character in his brief. He planned to introduce items that could make a profit: teak plantations for shipbuilding, rubber, indigo for dye, spices, tobacco, cotton, and sugar. And medicinal ones, too, such as cinchona. Its bark was used for quinine, the only known treatment for malaria, a significant obstacle in conquering and ruling many tropical areas—including vast parts of India—and in expanding Britain’s dominion. Botanical science was part of the Empire—with an eye on commerce.

By the nineteenth century, botanic gardens in India had also been established in Saharanpur, Bombay, Madras, and Poona (Pune), with the one in Calcutta as the subcontinent’s nerve center. Under Kyd’s successor, William Roxburgh—the first salaried man to take charge and often called the Father of Indian Botany—it developed into a top-notch institution. Along with splendid gardens and beds, it had a herbarium with dried species for taxonomical reference, a vast library that held key works from around the globe, and the domed-toped, octagonal Palm House, with pink- and white-flowering climbers growing up over the ironwork to shade the palms inside.

At its helm when the packet of indigenous tea samples from Assam arrived was Dr. Nathaniel Wallich. Even in a time of unlikely success stories, he was something of a surprise to be the East India Company’s chief botanist in India.

Born Nathanael Wulff Wallich, the son of a Jewish merchant in Denmark, he studied medicine at the Danish Academy of Surgeons in Copenhagen. At twenty-one, with limited prospects in the academic world of Lutheran Denmark, he took a position as a surgeon in the Danish “factory” at Serampore, near Calcutta. He arrived in late autumn of 1807. The timing was terrible. Denmark had allied with France during the Napoleonic Wars, a coalition enemy of Britain’s, and the East India Company annexed the settlement in 1808. Wallich became a prisoner of war.

But Roxburgh, then superintendent of the Botanic Garden, recognized the Dane’s skills and not only successfully petitioned for Wallich’s release, but also to have him join the East India Company as his assistant. Wallich rose swiftly. In 1815, at age twenty-nine, he became the temporary superintendent of the garden, and then, two years later, was made permanent. Under his tenure, it grew greatly in size and number of workers, employing upward of three hundred gardeners and laborers. Wallich held his post until retiring to London in 1846. Such longevity was nearly unknown in British India, especially among botanists and plant collectors, who tended to die in their thirties—or younger—from the hazards of climate and endemic diseases amplified by spending months at a time in the field.

An early and vocal advocate in protecting the forests in India and Burma, Wallich was also an assiduous and generous collector. In 1828, on convalescence leave in England, he took along thirty crates that contained between eight thousand and ten thousand species gathered over the previous quarter century and passed them out. The haul was dubbed the “Wallichian herbarium” and is considered one of largest ever brought—or distributed—in Europe. Institutions shared the spoils, but so did private collectors. Some of these individuals became wealthy from the gifts, while Wallich remained, as he put it himself, “as poor as a church rat.” Not that poverty stopped his largess. Back in India, he was even more lavishly open handed. Between 1836 and 1840, the botanic garden, under his leadership, distributed 190,000 plants to more than two thousand institutions and individuals in India and abroad, to parks and native princes, civil servants, and even European collectors.

His future generosity aide, Wallich made a key mistake that summer of 1825. The leaves and seeds that Bruce had sent came from the camellia family, Wallich concluded, but they were not Camellia sinensis—tea. He did nothing to pursue the lead.

Was it an authentic error? The botanical authorities in Calcutta were deeply reluctant to acknowledge that tea existed in India, suggested Harold Mann. It was “always apparently the part of the botanists to doubt and deny, rather than to encourage the idea that tea was present in the country.”

The Company simply had little reason to put its energy or money into exploring the possibility. At the time Bruce’s packet arrived, the East India Company still held a monopoly on bringing Chinese tea to Britain.

~~Darjeeling- The History of The World's Greatest Tea -by- Jeff Koehler