My interest in all things plants (as you must have noticed from the little botanical doodles sprinkled around this website) must have always been there, dormant like a seed. But it truly began to blossom when, at INTACH (New Delhi, India), we invited botanical illustrator Nirupa Rao for a workshop. Best known for her stunning covers of Amitav Ghosh’s novels, namely, Gun Island, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Circle of Reason, The Hungry Tide and Glass Palace (published by Penguin-Random House India), she brought an entirely new visual language to our workshop on heritage documentation. This workshop aimed to introduce undergraduate students to a more holistic form of site documentation, one that captured not just the architectural but also the intangible and natural elements of a place.

From that point on, I couldn’t stop seeing the natural everywhere, especially during lunchtime strolls through Lodhi Gardens (New Delhi, India) with my spring-like colleague, a lover of bright colours and bloom. She would gently quiz me on the names of the flowers we passed: scarlet sage, petunias, daisies, poppies and the elusive tulips that bloom briefly in February before fading, for me truly the emblems of impermanence and transition.

Soon this ‘natural turn’ began to seep into my reading as well. Around the time of the workshop, I was deep into Swapna Liddle’s The Broken Script, an account of Delhi in the early nineteenth century, when the Mughal dynasty was in decline and the British East India Company was asserting its presence. A passing reference to Phoolwalon ki Sair, a flower festival, was enough to nourish my blooming curiosity. The festival began when Mirza Jahangir, the son of the then emperor Akbar II and Mumtaz Mahal Begum, fired at the British Resident and was exiled to Allahabad. His mother, distraught, vowed to walk barefoot from the Red Fort to the holy tomb (dargah) of Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli (in present Delhi) if her son returned safely. When he did, she fulfilled her promise. Locals scattered flowers along her path to ease her journey and floral fans (pankhas) were offered to both the tomb and the nearby Yogmaya temple. The event was such a hit, it became an annual tradition, the Phoolwalon ki Sair or Sair-i Gulfaroshan (literally, ‘Procession of Flower Sellers’), hosted even today.

I don’t think I had truly considered the depth of my affection for garden imagery until I began writing my PhD thesis (currently being revised into a book). In it, I analyse the Amwaju’l Khayal or Waves of Fancy, a topographical poem by a petty Mughal official, Abdul Jalil Bilgrami. Aimed at glorifying his hometown of Bilgram, the poem presents it as a paradise, which, in Islamic cosmology, is often envisioned as a garden, a space of eternal delight and divine order. Now, I don’t want to spoil the book for my as-yet imaginary readers, but as is well known, the Mughals were fond of their gardens. As Catherine Asher notes, the gardens of Babur weren’t just about aesthetics. They had funerary, dynastic and even religious significance. They were visual metaphors for power and control over land and people. Under Shah Jahan, the Chahar Bagh or quadrilateral garden layout reached its canonical form, having perfect symmetry as paradise. Ebba Koch traces this evolution through imperial sites, from the Anguri Bagh in Agra Fort to Shahjahanabad, where even the palace itself was envisioned as a garden.

This is perhaps why I was drawn—I wanted to say ‘quite delighted by’ but refrained (read my previous post to know why)—to the chapter on ‘Useful Plants’ in Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld (2024), which I also mentioned in my last blogpost. In it, Sanghera explores how the British used botany as a tool of empire. His exploration of the Kew Gardens in Richmond, England, which to my very ‘fascination’ (for lack of a better term),  has maintained rainforest conditions for over 170 years to house plant species collected from across the colonised world. As Sanghera argues, the irony of ‘botanical colonialism’ lies in creating a monster only to emerge as saviours by taming it themselves. In his words:

But it was the result of its manipulation of plants that British imperialists, among many other things, enabled the colonization of large parts of Africa, established new markets in new commodities, enabled global communications … spread/cured various catastrophic human/plant diseases, engaged in international espionage which involved bizarre disguises and incidents of torture and introduced into global cuisine ‘unknown names … from obscure corners of the globe’.

Naturally (pun intended), this sent me spiraling toward Netflix’s new limited series The Gardener. Set within the Atlantic world, a space shaped by the imperial plantation economy, the show’s protagonist Elmer, an assassin ‘disguised’ as a gardener, creates poisons from plants. Both he and his ultimate target, Violeta, are named after plants, coincidence? I think not. To me though, Elmer isn’t just pretending to be a gardener. He is weaponising his green thumb, brewing poisons with the precision of a botanist-turned-assassin. However, the show has so many layers, especially the twisted mother-son dynamic, honestly, a Freudian goldmine. Though what caught my eye first were the animated illustrations in the opening credits, which instantly reminded me of Rao’s style.

Equally ‘fascinating’ were the scenes showing Elmer brewing the poison and once again, I was taken back to Sanghera, who writes about the realised value of the South American cinchona tree. The bark of the tree was known to contain quinine, a chemical compound used to prevent malaria-induced fever, ‘which is reported to have killed more people than all other diseases and wars on earth combined’. Let’s just say, whenever I describe reading or watching something with ‘fascination’, it’s always laced with a dread of existentialism. That dread only deepened when I read that it wasn’t the British but the Dutch who ended up dominating the quinine market. Why? The Dutch, wanting to establish a lucrative export industry, invested heavily in cinchona, while the British were content with lower-quality strains, just effective enough for use in the Indian colonies. After all, inferior healthcare, not meaningful access to medicine, was the norm for the colonised. Equally disturbing are the racialised names of plants that Sanghera compels us to register in our memories, terms like ‘Niggerhead’, ‘Jew Bush’, ‘Coolie’s Cap’ and most jarringly for me, ‘Kaffir plums’. So the next time I order a kaffir lime mocktail at a restaurant, I will remember the omnipresence of imperialism.

In The Gardener, further, there’s a romantic scene where Elmer takes Violeta to an old nursery that, as he puts it, has preserved ‘exotic’ plants for hundreds of years. This follows a book-shopping trip where Violeta expresses interest in a book about escape and tells Elmer she wants to go ‘someplace exotic’. So, Elmer plans a date night at this nursery, a space that reminded me instantly of how I imagine Kew Gardens would be like. Adding another layer to this was that the series is set in Pontevedra, which, as I later discovered, was part of the imperial sugar plantation world.

My thoughts wander, as they tend to, and I realise how often I end my academic essays with something like ‘this study aims to contribute to the ever-growing thicket of...’ so and so aspect of history. Plus, in my chapter on Abdul Jalil, I note how he used relatable and ‘garden variety’ (pun intended) metaphors from their shared vocabulary as a way to connect emotionally with his distant-living son. 

This blog post is, hence, my attempt to make sense of this obsession with all things plants, which has now grown wild and unruly like a neglected garden. But perhaps that’s the beauty of it.