Footpath, Foothold and Flowers
In the city and the villages that surrounded it, where I grew up, almost anything that one throws away grows (plants and seeds) on its own provided they did not rot away due to too much water. There was no need to water the plants and like a clock set, the rain did come in 10 to 14 day cycles even in the dry season.
Inter-monsoon rain was regular and now I understand and believe that the vegetation itself fashion this rain and its cycles.
More trees mean more regular inter-monsoon rain.
Less trees mean less rain, for sure, inter-monsoon period.
I lived for short period in Kurunegala and we moved there since doctors advised my father to move out to reduce the recurrence of wheezy episodes I had in Kandy, when very young. We moved back and I never had any problems and the problems were probably, related to growing up and possibly poor nutrition,
I ponder now.
That is just to restate the damp state of affairs of my city, yesteryear.
Even Kurunegala the weather, then, when compared to the present day, with lot of vegetation and coconut trees was very mild but with more frequent dry spells than in Kandy. Now we are going through the cycle of perennial failure of rain.
The rain that falls in the upcountry where the most important the hydroelectric power plants are located is failing now.
All these are related to modernization and clearing up of the scanty vegetation for what is called the accelerated development.
It is going to get worse and there is no master plan to arrest it except adding more vulnerable projects including coal power plants.
Coal power plants will cause irreversible damage to our eco-system and by the time it is recorded by scientific pundits I would have been long gone (deadwood on a cremation site) but I hope somebody will trace back to year 2000, where I started voicing this on a regular basis in the Web.
It would have been voiced even earlier, if it had not been due to the slow pace of development of the Web and the Internet, in Ceylon.
The neglect and the failure of the printed papers industry (especially the newspapers and their monopoly deciding what to print) to expose the inevitable economic and and environmental catastrophe made me to be active at least in the Web.
I felt of the need to identify the proactive indicators of disaster with the economic impact in mind for a small island state which is entangled in ‘debt trap’.
If the printed media was timely, proactive, I would never have been active in the Web, let alone it is not my field of expertise.
Now I have made it a pastime.
I have moved into a new type of study, what I call the "my sphere of activity" (very limited indeed) and ‘my limited observations’ and I want everybody who is versed in biology (or not) would contribute to this type of observation and record observable events, since we cannot believe the government and its courtiers (the better time is henchmen) to do it.
They will never make any worthwhile investment (except pass legislation, they themselves violate with impunity) to this effort since politicians and their stooges won't understand the impact of sustainable policy on environment (the better term is mother nature).
Like the mess we have inherited with the success in limited over cricket in 1996 (little after that except 2012, T-20s) and ordering the filling up of an ancient water tank and building a cricket ground on it, is the classic example of the idiocy of our policy makers cricket or otherwise.
We are set for power cuts in spite of thermal power added to the system.
Now if I do not water the plants including water plants they will dry up and wilt away in a shorter spell of time as short as three days.
Unfortunately, there is nobody to help me with, some background knowledge in biology to look after my plants. If I go out for a short holiday for two weeks abroad, all my plants, I have collected over a period of little longer than two decades will be no more.
This has happened to me not once but twice because of my frequent foreign sojourns.
I am very late in using my power of observations.
When we were young we did not have to worry about plants wilting away.
The observation period should have been over 25 years, or more but due to my frequent absence away from home on foreign soils for work, I have missed a big chunk of observation.
The decline probably started rapidly after 1975, when the plantation section was nationalized by the ill advice of the political leftists of this country.
The Oil Crisis in Middle East and the Cash Crisis in Ceylon aggravated the already volatile political situation with JVP riding high and then the government in power crushing the uprising brutally, in 1971.
I am one who believes that there was no need for an armed struggle by JVP at that time and if the government took correct political steps, like the leftists’ demise in this country, JVP would have headed for its own demise and self-destruction.
By the way, if they were able to wrestle power, they did not have even a rough sketch a political plan for this country. What it really achieved was to spark the armed struggle by LTTE. Even, the LTTE would have achieved much for the Tamil people, if they worked with the local politicians and people, instead of becoming a pawn of the Indian secret service, the RAW.
This little political intermission is mandatory since India for some reason did not want us to manage our problems and succeed economically and politically.
Only India and Indians know why they took such an action.
Everything, I observe, is in the direction of loss of biodiversity.
The little exotic (I have lost all the orchids except one tiny specimen) plants I have, if I do not replant will be lost, not only in the wild, but in my garden too, which is very very tiny indeed.
Lot in my neighborhood has changed, except for a few coconut trees all the trees have been felled by the owners in less less than 20 years. The trees felled include, the breadfruit tree (where the birds used to perch on their evening return), the jack trees, water pistol trees, a Kithul tree and the tall tree (I do not know the name) where birds used to feed on the leaves and stems (I do not know why) during long spells of drought. I believe this tree produces a chemical or chemicals that down the appetite of the birds (even squirrels) but stimulate the brain when fruits are hard to come by.
I never chew a leaf of this tree to see what chemicals it has to entice me, fearing interference with mother nature.
Glad to say, I have contributed to the few remaining ones which include a few exotic palm trees and my wife’s contribution is the mulberry tree and the bamboos. None of them was for commercial value but for shear beauty of their presence in our garden. I may have brought thousands and thousands of ornamental plants over the years, since the land was barren with a big rock in the middle.
There was a plant which I used to call ‘jute plant’ that grew in the crevices of the rock, it bloomed at the top of a tall flowering stem and produced hundreds of little adventitious shoots.
I could neither get a single one to survive nor to find a new plant from even the botanical garden. Its fiber is used in India and Bangladesh to produce rice sacks.
Strangest of my observations was the little white flower.
I got the seeds from botanical garden and tried to grow them in our plot but never succeeded. But they get established in a place that I did not intend to, in the first place.
Very pleasant surprise; to see the vine exhibiting its beautiful white flower near the house of a person known to me. In fact, his wife had worked under my supervision for a brief period. The owners had left to Canada 20 years ago and that house is still empty and once in 5 years somebody cleans the garden up and there was no way the cleaner, not a gardener had planted it, there.
Few of them were still there, until recently.
But to my surprise, the new owner, bulldozed the garden in two days and no more of the vines left.
Same day, I went to the botanical garden from where I got the seeds (from the hanging runners coming over the fence). To my horror those runners have all gone, no flowers and dried up stems were seen on a tall tree.
I think I did some honors to the Botanical garden for picking few seeds (never able to see flowering in our garden) and spread them in our garden which (now) had got washed away and landed on a foreign soil where nobody was living.
The sense of sympathetic joy was overwhelming then and that is why I have to pen it down here.
But that joy is no more with the builders coming in for the final kill recently.
I now remember few years ago, just couple of meters away there was an exotic plant and on a rainy day dug up the yams added to my collection. I now have an enormous collection (personal favorite) of it on my rooftop garden.
The comment below is now redundant.
I will be picking up some seeds from those white flowers and try again to germinate them and perhaps, I might even donate few seeds to the botanical garden chief (previous one was a good friend of mine and I never asked him for any exotic plants except those on sale).
The present one when I met, I suggested that he should start selling water plants (which has become a monopoly of a selected few) and I am glad to say he has obliged.
I should wind up after stating from whom I learned the secret of throwing seeds all over the footpath (by accident) where I walk, at slow pace, almost ambling.
It was my wife's grandma.
She had the habit of spreading the seeds all over the garden and I used to pull most of them out to get some order in the garden. She was a sweet lady and she needed flowers for her daily offering to Buddha and we had at least 5 varieties almost everyday.
Now she and her daughter and my mother are all gone we cannot pluck two varieties on a single day except on my rooftop garden but they come not from terrestrial plants but from an assortment of water plants.
Strangely enough, my rooftop garden has three to six including, three varieties of jasmine which I grow (a trick I learned from my mother) in the memory of my mother who died well past 90s (and the other two ladies too, I fondly remember when I see these flowers).
I wish, I should not live that long since, if I do that long there won't be any birds or wildflowers to smell in this blessed island.
But as long as I could walk up the footpath (any footpath, for that matter) I am going to pluck dry flowers and spread the seeds like how birds do.
I don't care where they start germinating and like a good Buddhist, I have lost the attachment to any worldly thing including flowers.
In this scenario, I differ slightly from Buddhist virtues.
I want our great great grandchildren to have a reminder of the old times not of my photographs but some of the beautiful and fragrant flowers which we are losing by the day.
I now collect the photographs of all the flowers.
We do not have bees and the the little innocent black variety which are there for the last 30 years, come daily to our rooftop garden to collect honey from my tiny flowers of water plants.
20 years ago, there was a seed I tried to germinate by various mean but never could. Then one day I asked the laboratory assistant who was a keen gardener and one of my patients, (until his death nearing 90s), told me that the seeds crack when there is intense heat and then when the rain comes it germinates and if I soak the seeds they will rot.
Just by accident, I picked up three of those plants to pot before they are run over by the three wheeler drivers who reverse onto the wayside in a hurry. The road is now finished with concrete to lure the voters. It gets heated up and the seeds on either side crack and germinate.
Suffice is to say, all the seeds are coming from a plant / tree my mother in law planted.
When the older generation take the exit pathway like in America, we will have only commercial growers and mono-culture or tissue culture cultivars.
