Three balconies, a driveway, a front patch and a verdant backyard. Uma Mukherjee makes optimal use of available space and grows an enviable collection of local as well as exotic plants. So rubbing shoulders with Roses and Hibiscuses are Dragon Fruits and Avocados that she brought back from her travels as far off as Africa. But what’s unusual about Mukherjee is that she also carries her plants overseas and often sows them there to grow.
My passion for gardening developed in my childhood with my father dividing among us siblings various duties to look after plants. And today, my brother has a nursery of his own and his sister is an ardent greenthumb. I grow fruits like Kiwi, Blackberry and Mulberry, vegetables like Bitter Gourd and Sheem, flowers like Orchids and leafy varieties like Coleus.
There’s a Giloy creeper that climbs up the water pipe from our drive way and a Benarasi mitha paan that innumerable residents of Salt Lake have taken from me to grow in their homes. I am not in the habit of chewing paan but I must admit that the leaves taste delicious. Whenever I’m working on the plants, I can simply pluck a leaf, wash it and get munching.
I travel far and wide and like to bring back any plants that catch my fancy. From Spain I got a beautiful Sunflowerlike plant, from Uganda I got Avocado. The Avocado isn’t sweet per se but its texture is like butter!
One plant I cannot praise enough is the Aloe Vera. Such are its healing properties that I almost never leave home without it. I have been a biology and sports teacher and once in school when a student cut her arm in a window, I applied it as first aid. Then on a trip to Bakkhali, a relative burnt his hand. Again it was the juice of this miracle plant to the rescue.
I carry a stem in my belt pouch and it stays fresh for 12-13 days. On my trip to Bangladesh, in fact, I ended up planting some Aloe Vera and Paan in the soil there. A constant worry during my travels is not being able to water the plants back home. I have now come up with a solution for this. Instead of keeping them in pots, I now keep some of them in coconut husks and keep cocopeat instead of soil at the base