Lodhi Gardens - We are a pleasant walk straight down our road  from the Lodhi gardens (named after the 15the century Indian rulers who established the garden).  The garden is a real mixture of botanical garden, monument park and fitness guru's exercise venue.  I've been there several times now at different times of day and it seems a different place each time.

My first visit was with Felix at the end of the day about an hour before dusk.  We came through the main gate which opens onto a narrow ashoka tree avenue and the noise of the roosting green parrots was tremendous.  We have noticed that green parrots like old buildings in India, so there are often flocks of them in parks surrounding tombs.  After we got through the short avenue we noticed the masses of people.  The park was teeming with different groups.  Many, many men clearly walking through the park after work with their briefcases still in hand companionably talking.  Others had changed into their jogging gear and were either gently jogging or briskly walking in small groups on the designated jogging 'track.'  Some individual young people were walking rather large pure bred dogs or plugged into ipods deliberately getting some exercise, but in general people were in groups.  The generous green areas had some serious athletes doing vigorous calisthenics together and some yoga practitioners focused on their contortions while a group of elderly men clad in white sat together in, what looked like, profound conversation on one side of the green expanse, and on the other side, another group of white clad elderly woman chatted peacefully.  Did the white represent something?  Were the two elderly groups related to one another?  This first visit Felix and I were actually looking for a restaurant and so had little time to focus on the buildings (I'm sure you remember how urgent food is for a 17 year-old), but we did notice there is a bonsai garden and masses and masses of cuttings being rooted and large areas that look like nursery.

The second visit was in the early afternoon when Bert and I went to discover a pleasant route through the gardens to the Khan Market and had our walk cut short by the abrupt arrival of one of the last monsoon showers.  In contrast to the first impression the garden seemed quite empty and the primary beneficiaries of the lush surroundings were courting couples.  We discovered two tombs and extensive walls of a third before the rain hurried us on to the Khan market.

My third visit this week with Elaine was a very slowly, leisurely affair in the earlier part of the day.  Now the most visible people were the masses of garden staff.  Even the weeding women seem to have a light blue sari uniform for their duties.  Perhaps there are different levels of garden employee - some of the men had similar light blue pyjama like outfits, but others were without uniform.  It was stunning to witness one women over hours bent double to do her weeding. I would have chosen to either kneel or squat.   We never did see her upright.

We looked at three of the five tombs (really walled monuments housing smaller tombs) in the garden and they are magnificent despite the inevitable mildew that the humidity brings with each monsoon season.  There are hints of how glorious they must have looked at one time with fragments of coloured tiles left in a few spots, but the shapes and the layout are still clear and dramatic.  Elaine is a sketcher and bird  and butterfly watcher so we sat for twenty minutes at a time and it was a delight to discover more birds as we sat still in the shade. The butterflies were a lot more exhausting because they enjoy full sunshine, so although we did see some glorious examples I much preferred the less demanding ornithological study from the shade.  As we sat in one place we received attention from two different Indian men - one a young man who thought we might be interested in visiting his church, and the other  older man who was clearly thrilled to practice his English on someone. 

In one part of the garden that hosted many flowering plants that attracted butterflies we found a large tree with masses of roots dangling down from its branches being trained into wide bamboo poles.  I've discovered that the bunyan tree has its seeds scattered by birds onto other trees and the bunyan then germinates in the crevice of another tree's branch and from there sends down these long dangling roots to the ground.  I haven't discovered what the gardeners were doing in training these roots through the bamboo pipes though!

Looking forward to more Lodhi discoveries.