Colourful Company: Where the Wildflowers Bloom

I often stand in my kitchen overlooking my downstairs neighbour’s balcony, where a beautiful garden flourishes. Since it’s an apartment complex in Kanpur, calling it a garden might be a bit of a stretch, but there are rows upon rows of immaculately painted pots with plants that are positively thriving. And then there’s my balcony, with a handful of plants in various stages of dying.

My will to do anything about expanding my garden ends at dreamily thinking of gorgeous flowers on my balcony. Last winter, I planted some seeds and promptly forgot about them. To no one’s surprise, the few scraggly saplings that did fight their way into the world soon withered away for want of tending. I sighed and gave up; there would be no home-grown lettuce for our salads or pansies for our vase this year. A few days later, a gift I hadn’t anticipated awaited me.

My lettuce pot was soon overrun by a delicate and profusely growing clover-like plant. There was something quite cheery about the bright green leaves and the tiny yellow flowers, and intent on finding out its name, I searched for “yellow flowers”, “wild”, and “clover leaf” on the internet. The ID was easy to find; my newest garden addition was the Oxalis corniculata, an edible wildflower, though I couldn’t muster up enough courage to taste it.

Elated with my find, I started to consciously look for more flowers growing wild and instructed my resident gardener (aka my husband) to leave the lettuce pot alone to see what else would grow in it. The more I looked, the more I found!

As months passed and seasons changed, various flowers bloomed in the untended spaces — sidewalks, the corners of the lawn, which sometimes get ignored, and pots we’ve conveniently forgotten about. In February, I spotted the Achyranthes aspera growing on the sidewalk, its spiky maroon flowers arranged neatly on a long stalk. In early March, a profusion of tiny, purple Japanese Mazus grew between the pavement stones in my apartment complex, defying the scythe of the maali intent on keeping the gardens trimmed. And right around that time, the oxalis in my pot gave way to the strikingly-blue garden pimpernel, followed by the burr clover with the tiniest yellow flowers measuring barely 2 cm. That single pot became the proverbial gift that kept on giving.

Out on my walks, I found purple thistles, hawksbeards masquerading as dandelions, and tridax daisies which the bees simply could not get enough of. I stayed clear of the poisonous datura, but no amount of thorns could keep me from looking closely at the prickly poppy and the thorny nightshade. And with the first showers, delicate purple minnieroots sprouted on the side of the roads.

I wanted to learn more about wildflowers in India, so I turned to books. There are few comprehensive resources in India on this subject, and a dogged search will give you just enough to get started. There’s the lovely if dated, Wildflowers of Kashmir available online, written by BO Coventry and published in 1930. There’s a lot of useful information in the book, though it’s hard to say how relevant it is now, almost a century later. More recently, two books have proved invaluable to me: the Common Indian Wild Flowers, written by Isaac Kehimkar and published by the BNHS, and Wildflowers of India, by Nimret Handa.

My internet searches serendipitously brought me to Paulmathi Sekar Ramasubramanian’s Instagram, where she documents wildflowers across India. Armed with a macro lens, Mathi has photographed wildflowers not only in remote locations of Sikkim and Uttarakhand but also from around her home in Tamil Nadu. When I spoke to her about our shared passion for wildflowers, I found out that Mathi and her husband have also written a book on the wildflowers of North America, where they lived a few years earlier.

Speaking about the huge contrast in her experience of hunting wildflowers in the USA and India, she says that people’s perception is very different in both countries. “There is a lot of awareness about wildflowers in the West as opposed to India, where people are hardly interested in them. Around me in India, the people who are passionate about plants are mostly interested in their medicinal uses,” she adds.

In North America and Europe, there is a lot of awareness and interest in the conservation of wildflowers. On YouTube, one can find numerous videos on how to cultivate a wildflower garden, wildflower seeds are available at nurseries, and public campaigns like #NoMowMay encourage people to let their gardens go wild in May. There are several protected sites across North America and Europe which people can visit to see colourful wildflowers in bloom (remember the annual explosion of photos of California poppy fields on Instagram?), and many botanical gardens maintain herbariums devoted to native wildflowers.

There are a few spots like that in India that draw tourists to the beauty of wildflowers in bloom. Apart from the protected Valley of Flowers in Uttarakhand and Sikkim, a popular location (and a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site) is the Kaas Plateau in Maharashtra, where one can find several varieties of orchids, sundews, and other native flowering plants.

But outside of these protected areas, plant populations are rapidly declining. In his book on wildflowers, Issac Kehimkar writes that a united effort from government institutions, botanical gardens, naturalists and other concerned stakeholders is needed to ensure their conservation in India. When I speak to him about past and present efforts undertaken for wildflower conservation, he tells me that it’s mostly individuals with a passion for nature working towards this cause. “Most people think wildflowers are weeds, something to get rid of. While there are passionate nature enthusiasts who, in the process of setting up informal gardens for butterflies and bees, have planted wildflowers, there are few large-scale conservation efforts,” he says.

From my experience, I know what Kehimkar says about wildflowers being considered weeds is quite true. On my last visit home to Dehradun, my parent’s garden was carpeted by hundreds of Japanese mazus, making the garden look more purple than green. They have since been “weeded” out and replaced with carpet grass. Our garden, resembling manicured English lawns, certainly looks neat now, but in the process, we’ve lost the effortless beauty of the wildflowers.

If you’re interested in learning about wildflowers, a good place to start is the wildflower walk conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society in their reserve. Follow their nature trails page to find out when the next walk is scheduled.