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Wildbuzz: In the heart’s crevices bloom wild flowers
Deepak, a highlander of the Banjar valley in Kullu, is the proverbial wild flower in a perfect bed of roses. His email identity goes by the name of ‘DeepakRebel’
Deepak, a highlander of the Banjar valley in Kullu, is the proverbial wild flower in a perfect bed of roses. His email identity goes by the name of ‘DeepakRebel’ while his social media identity is ‘Deepak Atheist’. A rare man from the Himachal hills, he does not believe in God or the numerous Devis and Devtas that undergird the state’s cultural life. Nature is Deepak’s guiding light, his moral compass and the source of his spiritual well being. A pair of Himalayan bulbuls and a lone Laughing thrush would come to his hand in the winter snows to relish dry raisins. Such was the trust, the benign aura of the atheist that lured wary avians to a human hand.
Deepak, all of 30 years, has an abiding passion: wild flowers of the lofty Himalayan glades. To know the depth of his love, his recent three-day trek to Jalori pass was revealing. He preserved his smartphone battery for only one use, to photograph flowers. Unlike his three trekking mates, who indulged in numerous selfies and group pictures, Deepak’s phone brimmed with flower photographs.
“As we climbed to Jalori pass, which is above 10,000 feet, I was a laggard. My companions raced to the peaks but I would stop at a flower and take pictures. Then, I would shut down the phone to conserve battery life and forbid myself from taking more flower pictures. But as I climbed, another pretty flower would waylay me with her smiles. I would then again switch on my phone and take another picture. It went on and on till my battery charge expired,” Deepak told this writer.
Deepak inherits his love for flowers from his father, a PWD employee who managed the resthouse at their native village of Bahu. “My father took great pains to cultivate a variety of flowers in the resthouse garden. In our house also, I have grown many flowers,’’ said Deepak.
He shares his passion for Himalayan flowers with an innumerable number of Himalayan travellers and tourists through the ages. Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh’s late father, Maharajah Yadavindra Singh, was devoted to gardening and would travel to the Himalayas every spring to admire alpine blooms. Capt Amarinder is planning a book on his father’s passion for Himalayan flowers illustrated with delicate paintings by the late Rai Bahadur Ganga Singh.
To all those like Deepak, Maharajah Yadavindra Singh and travellers of the Himalayas, a pithy verse from an anonymous bard would pay a timeless tribute: “The crevices in my heart, some shallow some deep, Grow wildflowers so beautiful, not weeds, The crevices in my heart are precious orifices to keep!”
LIFE IS THE PITS
Our diligent gardener of many years, Vinod K Yadav, has been efficient at digging serial compost pits and then filling them up in the backyard of our Sector 19 garden in Chandigarh. Our kitchen wet wastes, garden leftovers/wastes etc go into the pit while household dry wastes are put in the bin and picked up by waste collectors every morning. That simplifies the hard-working waste collector’s task, lends it dignity by obviating the need to physically segregate the wet from dry wastes, and renders the burden of his carriage less weighty.
The garden benefits from enriched soils of maturing compost pits. Garden birds and insects have gained enormously as the festering, unclosed compost pits have fostered a magical, mini-ecosystem. The number and variety of insects the pits have spawned has been taken advantage of by insectivorous bird species, snapping lizards and butterflies/moths that feed on rotting fruits.
Hovering and buzzing insects attract Black drongos, Tailor birds, Common mynas, Jungle babblers and even a migratory Black redstart. A female redstart in passage from the high Himalayas to further down in the sub-continental plains spent a day perched over the compost pit greedily devouring insects in October 2019. She was back for two days while returning to her breeding grounds up north in April 2020.
However, the utmost advantage has been usurped by Tailor birds. A pair had set up a nest last summer in our front garden but the breeding failed. The pair then made another nest close to the pit in the backyard and successfully reared three chicks on a diet rich in insects. This summer, too, I was happy to see the pair rear another two chicks and the babblers a troupe of little ones.
The flip side was that feral cats prowling around the garden noticed the abundance of birds in the pit’s vicinity. The cats would lay an ambush in the lemon and ‘motia’ bushes flanking the pit and pounce on unsuspecting birds till the avian community got wiser and set up an alarm system. Rodents, too, sniffed the decomposing foods in the pit and set up base here, drilling a maze of holes in Vinod’s carefully manicured vegetable beds.
All told, the pit has been a blessing. The flowering plants dumped into the pit after the season was over just refused to pass gently into the night! A bunch of uprooted and dumped light-pink poppies woke up from the dead and started to bloom out of season at the edge of the pit while another bush of dumped sun flowers took root again on the pit’s other side. Certainly, more smiles than snarls has our pit attracted from all and sundry.
vjswild1@gmail.com
