Woke gardeners replace green deserts with urban jungles
The Hindu
Old fashioned manicured lawns are being replaced by environment-friendly tropical gardens filled with fruiting trees, indigenous plants and native flowers
Prim manicured lawns are being put to pasture. In their place, sassy urban jungles are springing up across the country, ablaze with fruit trees, flowering shrubs, water bodies and verdant greenery, much to the delight of ecologists and environmentalists.
A colonial legacy of the British, a lush lawn was the hallmark of buildings of the Raj. Irrespective of geographic locations, the lawn spread all over India with the imperialists. Like many British legacies, it stayed, even after the Raj was uprooted from India.
However, turf lawns guzzle water and are hungry consumers of pesticides and fertilizers to stay glossy. Sheetal Patil, researcher at Azim Premji University, says: “The chemicals silence crickets, ants, birds, butterflies and bees.”