Love for greenery attracts people to garden show in Chennai

CHENNAI: DakshinaChitra, an exciting cross-cultural museum at Muttukadu 25 km from here,  has gone green in more ways than one. The heritage museum along with Friends of DakshinaChitra (FOD) has organised a garden show which boasts of a rich variety of flowering plants, foliage plants, cactii, succulents, bonsai, addeniums, orchids and terrarium apart from garden equipment, seeds, fertilisers and miniature gardens from Chennai’s very best.

A unique feature this year is that there is no trace of plastic being used in the show, in keeping with the State government’s initiative to banish plastics from daily life.

“We used to have some people who would display the plants in plastic pots but we insisted this time that they had to display the plants in terracotta pots,” said Sharath Nambiar, deputy director of DakshinaChitra. 

The garden show, which was started three years ago, has seen a surge in interest with each passing year. Nambiar attributes this to people wanting to have their own gardens - a little bit of green in a concrete jungle.

“I live in an apartment and there is not much green around,” said K Lavanya, who lives in North Chennai. “I grew up in a village and wanted my children to be around greenery but since we live in an industrial area, there aren’t many trees around. I recently started going through tutorials on the internet about how I could make our house greener. Visiting this show is a way out for me to expand my knowledge of gardening. I’ve brought my children along to inculcate in them a love for nature so they start to enjoy gardening as well.”

The show, which started on January 13, will go on till Tuesday. One of the other highlights are the workshops being conducted.  On Tuesday, there is a workshop on terrace gardens by Hariesh Krishnamoorthy between12 and 1 pm and one on Bonsai basics by Suseela Vergis between 2:30 to 3:30 pm.