Breathing life into drabbest corners

Neeraj Bagga

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, August 25

An educationist Divjot Kaur Sandhu has been tending to her plants and flowers for a long time now. The Covid-19 induced lockdown gave her ample time to invest her in gardening. She merrily did so and came out with new concepts such as tray gardening and developing garden as per the cycle of seasons.

She has an array of plants, shrubs and vines in her garden and a rooftop garden. In the undergoing monsoon season, she focused on growing various forms of succulents, cacti, Champas, Rajnighanda, Rain Lilly, purple heart, turtle vine, jade, sweet potato, vine, Mexican Petunias, gomphrenas, dwarf hibiscus, moss rose and vincas.

For summers, she specifically arranged hardy plants such as palm, adeniums (deserts roses) and placed them along with vines, flowers, sweet potato vine, turtle vine, clematis, various forms of succulents and others on the terrace garden.

For the rooftop green space she made painstaking creative efforts to form things out of the waste material so that birds find it a suitable place to live in and rest. Abandoned tyres were coloured and marble slabs were put over them to form tables, steel rods, used in construction, were moulded to form hanging planters, grills were fitted at a corner of the terrace to give a platform look. Polyrasin sheets from the worn out umbrella were used to form nests and bird feeder.

A guest faculty at the Guru Nanak Dev University’s All India Services Coaching Centre she did her doctorate in geography, she added trays in her repertoire of plants and pots for which she found space in her balconies. She finds assistance in tending to gardens in her mother-in-law Dalbir Kaur Sandhu. Both of them also take care of two lawns. He garden Plenty of ficus, draceania, palms, Champas, Rajnighanda, rain lilly, Mexican petunias, gomphrenas are found in these two green patches she adores.