My Bangalore Adventure, part 10: More about Lal Bagh

If you come to the east/south gate of Lal Bagh, the Peninsular Gneiss is on your left and an Oriental Garden is on your right. There's a main boulevard in front of you which you can imagine bisects a clockface from 6 to 12. This boulevard is where all the action congregates. On the left, on my first vist, appeared to be a series of green food stalls and lots of people buying snacks. Actually, this turned out to be exhibit space and the annual Mango Festival was going on. silly me! I was totally unaware of it.

Instead, I veered away from the foot traffic and headed right along the edge of the imaginary circle, towards 5 o'clock and an area that looked like a naturalistic landscape with a large bamboo grove. I hoped to spot some good birds here and did succeed in finding a brown-headed barbet, a first for me.

The path in this direction skirted the Oriental Garden which appeared to have locked gates. Further on though, it looked like some people were in there so I thought maybe the gates were just closed but not locked. On a second visit, I learned that the garden really was locked and I had seen an illusion created by an exterior walkway.

Soon I came upon my first clue that Bangalore had a serious water problem. It was a fantastical fountain that represented some mythological or religious event with a seaside setting. Everything about it suggested a rocky cave lashed by ocean waves, except the fountain was bone dry, dusty, and scattered with brown leaves.

Eventually, I counted four fountains and one simulated woodland creek with waterfall, all missing their water. That reminded me of the middle swimming pool, the ladies-only pool, at the Diamond District, which was also empty of water. I had thought that pool was just undergoing seasonal maintenance. But now it occurred to me there wasn't enough fresh water available to Bangalore to justify keeping the public fountains operating.



As I reached about 4 o'clock on my walk, I noticed a large grassy space behind the Oriental Garden where people were playing games, running around, and picnicking....very much like an afternoon in Chicago's Lincoln Park but not what you expect in a place promoted as a botanic garden.

And there was a tree limb, downed by a storm long enough ago that all of the leaves had withered but no groundskeepers had cleared it away yet. Further on, near 3 o'clock, was an elaborate greenhouse filled with lotus pools and large-leaved jungle plants (aroids), but every door to this place was chained shut.

A stray dog, sleeping in the sun. A colorful cottage building of unknown purpose, doors locked with cracked walls and pillars and peeling paint. A broken brick walkway to a terrace with crumbling steps. And unexpectedly, Bambi!

There's a word for things taken out of their context and put in contradictory settings -- like the London Bridge in the Arizona desert -- but I can't think of that word right now. I don't think anything I had seen in Bangalore up to that point made me feel more like I had just gotten off the spaceship than seeing a Disneyana display of Bambi, Thumper the rabbit, and their friends in this formal garden setting.

And there was more. Once I got to about 2 o'clock on the perimeter, I cut in to the center to get back to the main boulevard. Here I found Snow White's dwarves - all seven of them.

They were arranged around a mechanical clock set into a bank of flowers, behind which, on my sightline, was a very Napoleonic formal column and sculpture of some historical person on horseback, and beyond that, a modernistic, 1960-ish fountain without water. All backed by trees and hedges that seemed to say, "This way to the real botanic garden!"



Deliberate or accidental, I felt like I had wandered into an attic of discarded colonialism.

But the boulevard back to 6 o'clock did take me through a beautifully kept circle of topiary followed by a pretty gazebo where concerts might be held on occasion, followed by the Glass House -- an open-air exhibition hall for staging large-scale, seasonal horticultural displays and fairs.

One write-up had mentioned there was a rose garden of 5,000 plants. Now to me, even a single well-kept rosebush in full bloom can be a tremendous work of natural art, so 5,000 of them?? I took the detour, past an ancient huge tree, distressed to see so many people had carved names and initials into it, and found the rose garden. It too had gates chained shut, paths calf-high with grass and weeds, none of the bushes pruned or groomed, and only a few fading flowers.

On a second visit, the grass was cut and the stems pruned, so I guess the blooming season just starts and ends a lot earlier than it does in Chicago, or Oregon.

Time was up, an early monsoon storm was brewing, there was a spotted owlet huddled on a low branch (another first!)

I left with at least a quarter of the garden plus the lake unexplored that first day, but came back and may be back again. It's a weird, wonderful, sad, aggravating, beautiful, thought-provoking place.