Delhiwale: Vasant Vihar’s secret garden

Krishna Prasad Jain’s bungalow has three levels of lushness — a lawn below, a nursery on the roof and a terrace garden in between. There’s is fourth level too, one inside Mr Jain’s phone.

These lush gardens resemble nothing less than a painter’s deliciously smeared canvas. They’re the work of one man, Krishna Prasad Jain, who has dedicated 15 years of his life in creating a private forest of flowers, like a little Lodhi Garden of his own.

Krishna Prasad Jain with his wife Madhu at their terrace garden. (Mayank Austen Soofi / HT Photo)

At his bungalow in Vasant Vihar, Mr Jain explains he has sculpted no less than three levels of lushness. “There’s a lawn below and a nursery on the roof. I keep plants in the nursery until they’re finally ready to be brought down to the terrace.”

A retired physics professor, he and his wife, Madhu, prefer hanging out in the terrace garden, which is their shrine to privacy. They can view life on the busy south Delhi road without passers-by even noticing the terrace. There’s no end to the variety of flowers — ranging from chrysanthemums to pansies — that Mr Jain has pampered over the years with assistance from gardener Bir Singh, who is watering plants in the nursery even as we converse.

And there’s more. A magnificent bougainvillea tree overlooks the stairs connecting the terrace to the nursery. “It flowers profusely during the monsoon,” says Mr Jain. An AC unit is cleverly half-hidden under fallen pink pedals.

It turns out Mr Jain’s garden has a fourth level, too. That’s in his mobile phone. Its photo folder is filled with pictures of his terrace taken at different times of the year. The December folder, for instance, is filled with chrysanthemums, and dahlia are in a brute majority of January.

He grants that outdoor living is out of the question during the summer months. “But in winter we come out here after breakfast and lounge about with coffee and books.” It gets too chilly as the evening sets in. Then the professor retreats from his flowery forest into the loving embrace of book-filled rooms.