Remembering the man who enhanced Bengaluru's green cover

BENGALURU: The first Indian superintendent of Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, a supremely disciplined man and someone who brought exotic fruits into the Garden City's landscape after studying the Kew Gardens, was how people who knew about Rao Bahadur HC Javaraya described him on Friday.
At a discussion on his life at a private event here, an audience member asked what could one do to live his vision for Bengaluru. "We can plant trees and stand up for them," said historian Meera Iyer, who has chronicled his life and journey.
Javaraya (1889-1946) was the first Indian superintendent of the government gardens department, and later, also the first Indian director of horticulture in the princely state of Mysore. He set up the Fruit Research Station in Hesaraghatta, the nucleus of Indian Institute of Horticultural Research. With his training in Kew Gardens in England, Javaraya was able to blend western ideas of garden design with his Indian sensibilities to put his stamp on the city's greenscapes.
Javaraya's love for trees and discipline was such that his grandson Harish Padmanabha remembered his workers called him Tiger.
Noted ecologist Ullas Karanth moderated the panel discussion with Chiranjiv Singh, former ambassador of India to UNESCO in Paris, artist Suresh Jairam, and Iyer. "Javaraya is important because he made horticulture and gardening a means of social uplift and part of the larger agenda of the kingdom's identity," Singh emphasised.
Karanth, who studied with Harish in NITK Suratkal, recalled reading a booklet about Javaraya from the 1930s. He regretted there was not much written about HCJ who was among those who built modern India. "We are desperately looking for heroes just by building 100ft statues and spoiling the landscape. Heroes are amid us but we need to go dig them out and show what they are," he added.
Iyer said a very interesting part about Javaraya was his non-frictional relationship with Krumbiegel, his predecessor at Lalbagh.