Cottage Gardens of India

The word "cottage garden" is synonymous with the English cottage garden all over the world. That word itself brings to mind the picture postcard images of pastel coloured blousy flowers such as, roses, foxgloves, cow slips and many of those typical English flowers that are grown in India during the winter. The philosophy behind creating the English cottage garden was however not to grow flowers but to create a functional space to grow vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants for the common folks. These gardens used to supplement the daily needs and provided medicines for common ailments of the owners. In fact, cottage gardens all over the world serve the same purpose and their cultivators add a dimension of beauty and individualism to it.

Indian adobe with a cottage garden

When I visualize an Indian cottage garden, I picture an adobe in the middle of green pastures of paddy or wheat fields. The vines of pumpkin, gourds and spinach scrambling to climb the roofs of those little homes. There will be a few flowering plants and shrubs which serve their purpose of offering Puja to their deities. A mango, jackfruit or neem tree if they have space which also provide them with the much required shady respite during the scorching summer. The equivalence of the English and Indian cottage gardens are pretty obvious where they are extensions of the homes and lives of the common people.

The historical chronicle of gardens in pre-Islamic India is very limited. We do not have any knowledge of gardens before the Vedic period and even during the Vedic era. The gardens that are mentioned in the Mahabharat or Ramayana are all either public-gardens or palace-gardens. Example of public-garden in Mahabharat can be found in the description of the capital city of the Pandava, Indraprastha which was supposedly surrounded by Udyan (Parks). In Ramayana, there is description of the city of Ayodhya with palace gardens and we also find a description of the grove of Ashoka trees where Sita was imprisoned. During the Buddhist era we find many allusions to gardens or Kananas. There are many references to the Amra-kanans (mango groves) and the gardens connected to the Bouddha-Vihara.

Jetvana in Sravasthi where there used to be a Bouddha Vihar

The gardens of medieval India are resonant of the Islamic and Persian gardens which are also connected to palaces, or are public-gardens. These gardens have their foundations connected to the heavenly gardens of the Islamic religion which are geometrical and proportional in shape. Water features such as fountains and reflecting pools are a requirement in these gardens. The old historical gardens in India that are still functional, are all from this era. With the advent of the British Monarchy, the gardens took a different form. The British emulated the landscape of their homeland wherever they colonized. These gardens had large green spaces cultivated as lawns and beds of perennials and annuals. The British (East India company as well as the Monarchy) built residence for its servants. These houses always had an attached garden. Some living examples can still be found in the old forest bungalows and many other housings from that era.

Islamic garden with geometrical form and water feature

British Colonial bungalow and garden

Given all these evolutionary trends, it is surprising that no one has written down anything about the gardens of the commoners of this country. The commoners whose lives remained the same no matter who ruled in Delhi over the centuries. The only edict in my knowledge which remotely alludes to a garden that should be built around a house is by a Bengali woman called Khona. 

"Pube hash, poschime bansh,
Uttare bere, dakkhine chere,
Ghor korogo pota jure."

A typical Bengal home with a duck pond

It literally means a house should have a pond to the east (a duck pond to be precise), a grove of bamboo to the west to filter the harsh rays of the setting sun, an enclosure with fruit trees such as mangoes or bananas to the north and always have the south end open to ventilate with warm southerly breeze. I find that plan very functional and even checking the box of sustainability. The edict almost stretches the idea of a garden which is a literal extension of a home.

This is a good idea for the people with a substantial piece of land and money to dig a pond and have a couple of groves around the home. The effort in a whole must be a substantial amount of landscaping. I am sure poorer folks without the access to that much land used to take advantage of their neighbours and built their houses nearby. The requirement of the middle class homes did not evolve much over the years. These homes always had a private courtyard which used to have its own uniqueness depending upon the needs of its household. Their rudimentary needs of flowers for offering, a tangy taste of lemon perhaps as an accessory to their food, and a seasonal fruit such a mango remained constant over the many centuries. 

A small suburban plot 

The ancestral home of Ritwik Ghatak with a typical courtyard

When I try visualizing a peaceful abode which incorporates these little features, I always start dreaming about our ancestral homes. These used to be how most Indians, aside from the ones in the urban parts of the country (there were not many until the 1970s), used to live like. The courtyards used to be a functional shared area for pickling the mangoes and tamarinds, drying the little moong dumplings in the sun during the summer or for unwinding and soaking in the sun during winter. It was a shelter for the household to chatter and for the children to play. 

The broader landscape around the house used to shelter a lot of critters, birds and mammals, and also provided a sense of community under the shades of banyan trees or in the vicinity of the ponds. Unfortunately, they have become victims of our over population and greed. They are now demolished willy-nilly to erect multi-storied apartments even in the villages. With them are gone the courtyards (the only courtyards in many parts of India are the Courtyards of the Marriot). The cottage gardens of India are now almost extinct and with it the art of cottage gardening is also lost.