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Since very few of the pictures I had tried to post appeared this morning, I reproduce them here, beginning with a pink temple flower, and two of them in the penultimate picture. Then you have a red crab claw and an orange one, and then the new bed on the other side of the house. Finally, though this was not mentioned in the post, I show a picture of flowers in the bed above the temple flower pond, roses and impatiens which I tried there, though all those gave up so that that bed now has the shrubs I showed a few weeks back.
I realize that, in talking about my actual garden, I have concentrated on its trees, old ones and new. Hardly any of them flower, so that there has in fact been no colour in my pictures except for the ehala blossoms at the beginning, and temple flowers, but those I showed were on my driveway, for the tree in the garden itself died some years back.
I did mention a new little tree I had planted, but for some reason I could not get a picture of a blossom there to load. I am trying to today to load it, first of all, and then fourth, but I fear it still seems recalcitrant. As I mentioned when I introduced it, it had not flowered for some time, so I pruned back a bush which covered it, and just last week little buds have appeared in two places, though they are not prominent enough to show now.
What does keep flowering are the crabclaws, two sorts of flowers, large red ones that justify the name, and then little orange blossoms. I have these tall plants on two sides of the garden, behind the lotus pond on the east and against the boundary wall on the other side too. The flowers are fun to glimpse there, through the other trees, but the plants can be a nuisance, for they droop soon and need to be tied back, and when the leaves are dying they are an ungainly brown.
The second picture here shows a bright red set of claws, and the third the more elegant orange blossoms, framed against the dying mango tree. For a moment I wondered whether this was a recent picture, for the marks on the tree look like those painted on the wall that replaced it, which I showed last week, but you can see a branch there too, sticking out to the right, and indeed this picture was taken two years back.
The fourth picture is of a wild ginger blossom, which thrilled me when it appeared a month or so ago, for I had not been successful with the ginger plants my sister gave me a few years back, red ones and also orange. Those I planted on the other side of the garden, next to the pink tub outside the porch, died soon, doubtless trampled by anyone looking into the pond, while those near the temple flower tree pond also slowly died away, except for the plant by the edge of the wall. It grew slowly, but it took a couple of years for blossoms to finally emerge. Sadly there have been none since, for a bud died away, and the plant too suffered in the storms of a couple of weeks back, and I do not know if it will revive.
But having shown all these shades of red, I will end with a yellow flower, one that I planted in the little bed that the workmen produced off their own bat at the end of the driveway, near the new garage. I show first the colourful plant I put in place there, and then the bed itself, which was initially planted with a lot of greenery. But since that last picture also seems to have problems loading, I have added the little temple flower that I had also placed as the first picture today!
I mentioned last week the birth and progress of the white fish that now dominate the pond with the waterfall (which I have not operated for the last several months given the danger to the babies). They are now positioned in three other ponds in the garden, and also in one of the new tanks on the balcony, and in addition there have also been more babies, born in July, soon after I got back to Colombo from my visit to England.
Unfortunately we saw the babies the day after I had just added some new fish, four little red carp and two black catfish, since I thought the pond looked a bit dull with just the one variety in the course of this year. We thought then of isolating the parents – the father seemed to be the same as with the present lot, having had his wicked way with his daughter – as we had done previously, but we realized this would be just too difficult, since we could not be sure of having identified the mother, and in any case that pond is a very difficult one from which to take selected fish while not harming the babies.
So we let them be, contenting ourselves with the thought that the other fish did not seem interested, and the parents seemed protection enough. But that has not worked, and the large numbers that can just be discerned on the right in the first picture, above the parents, dwindled over the next few weeks, until there is just one very little one. You can see him in the second picture, just above the reflection on the left of a tile in the wall above.
Above him there is another little one, who I think belongs to the December generation, though he is still very small. But as you see in the third picture, that generation is of very different sizes.
In this picture you see a couple of the red carp, and also at the bottom on the right one of the catfish. It is difficult to imagine that the white fish directly above him is of the same age as the one on his left, but harder to think he is the same age as the little one in the previous picture.
The four December children Kavi put in the pink bath tub under the croton tree are not that different in size as you see in the fourth picture. But there are only three here, and the fourth, which is smaller, tends to lurk at the other end of the tub.
The two Kavi placed in the pond round the temple flower tree grew very quickly, as you can see in the last picture, though neither became as big as the chap who had been there from the start. I think it was the two new ones who had babies about a week after we saw some in the other pond. The father was not always with her, but the mother seemed better at looking after her offspring than her counterpart, for several can now be seen. They were initially protected only by a lotus leaf, near which you see them in the fifth picture, but then she moved them to under the ceiling sheet I had placed for protection from birds, and initially she kept them there, so you had to lift it to catch a glimpse of them, but now they move out freely and no longer cluster together.
The other tree that had died by the time my little garden was set up, at the very end of 2016, was the mango tree which would have been on my side had my sister and I divided the land in the middle. But she wanted the entire longer section of the drawing room, which I thought well worth granting so we could expedite the process of partition. So a wall came up right across the columns that separated the two sections of the drawing room, and that line continued straight and went plumb through the mango tree.
But we both felt it should not be cut down, so the wall was built across the tree. We did have a forlorn hope that the tree was not entirely dead, and would survive, but had there been any chance of that the brickwork put paid to it, and soon enough there was no doubt that it was dead. And since the wood of a mango tree is not as hardy as that of a temple flower tree, it soon decayed.
It looked grand early on, towering above the wall, but Kithsiri was wary of it and thought it unwise to spend too much time under it. In this case he was right, though his predictions about falling branches from the temple flower tree have not proved accurate. One by one the lofty branches of the mango tree crashed to the ground, till only a trunk was left, and that shrank so that the wall, curved to the shape of the tree, was left standing with its sinuous curves while inside the trunk became smaller and smaller.
At that stage I thought it best to prop it up. So when after three months of curfew that stopped the crossing of provincial borders, the workmen were able to come to Lakmahal, in June 2020, I had them build not only the pond around the temple flower tree, with its props, but also a seat around the mango tree that would hold it in place. At the same time I moved the swing that had been decaying on the other side of the garden, where the temple flower tree props had now been placed, to the area between the waterfall pond and the lotus pond, so I could sit there and look at the sets of fish on either side after I had fed them.
That indeed was my preferred seat on that side, since there still seemed a danger of the higher sections of the trunk of the mango tree falling off, and in time that happened. Then I also began to suspect that it was through there that frogs got into my garden, for it was sealed off from the world in every other way. So, three years after the seat had been built, I decided, in consultation with my niece to whom now the area beyond my garden belongs, to fill in the gap. But while my workers painted her side smooth, on mine I had a different colour, with patches to suggest the boles of the tree, so that my now lost mango tree should not be forgotten.
The first picture shows the mango tree still standing tall, in 2019, and the next Toby gazing at it, in the previous year. But then you see it shorn, when the seat was put in place in 2020, after which I am on the seat with my morning coffee, one of the few occasions when I used the seat because the trunk still seemed dangerous. Then I am again on that seat, three years later, when the trunk has been truncated further. And then in June the wall was sealed, with the area that was filled painted as can be seen.
I have largely in this series celebrated my flowers and my fish, though I have also noted the sorrows of the whole exercise. Flowers of course fade, and that is not a problem for new blossoms emerge, but sometimes that does not happen and the plant dies. And even sadder is the death of fish with whom I have grown familiar.
I have mentioned some of these losses, and in particular the angels, large and small, but now I should record the great friends from whom I had to part before those deaths. As I have mentioned, when I had constructed a deeper pond with a waterfall, following on the installation of the yellow tub with lotuses, Lohan gave me a catfish which he had nursed back to health when its mate died, fearful initially that it had lost its sight. But he helped it recover and then gave it to me, I think out of kindness, though he said it was because it would have more space with me.
At that time I also transferred to that pond the two pond cleaners I had got initially, and though one died soon, the other could be seen on occasion, scuttling along the sides. And as I have shown, the catfish gliding along beneath the other coloured fish was a great source of joy.
The catfish and the remaining pondcleaner died together, I suspected having been frightened enough to hide in one of the little cavities behind the rocks that make up the sides when Sunil was cleaning the pond, and then getting stuck. When I got a strange smell I had the pond dredged, and we found both of them holed up there, unable to have emerged it seems.
I show the catfish here in death together with a gourami from the same pond who also died at this time. After that is a white carp which I had got recently. Earlier I had got four, and put them in the pond by the croton tree, but they delved into the mud and, having muddied the waters, could not be seen. So I moved them to the large pond, where they frolicked, but then one died and then, when there were heavy rains, the rest, while I was away.
But while I feel these friends should be recorded and remembered, I thought I should also look at the new life that developed in that pond. I spoke earlier of the angels born last October in the lotus pond on the balcony, and indeed showed their progress from the little dots we first discerned.
I mentioned too the spawn of the white fish in the waterfall pond, but only in connection with the removal of the other fish there, as the parents darted at any that came near their offspring.
They did a great job, though the mother died in the effort. But the babies were large enough then to survive, and they and their father continued to live there, in splendid isolation, though as mentioned some were brought to one of the new little ponds on the balcony, and before that Kavi had put a few into two of the tubs in the garden.
The third picture is of the babies in December, and the next two of them in March, with their father in the first. But the last picture is of the mother who died at the very beginning of this year.
I have written over four weeks about the trees and the shrubs that flourish in my garden, while dealing only cursorily with those that were there long ago, but had died before the garden was created, back in 2018. I have however mentioned the temple flower tree round which there is now a pond, but I should say more about it, for though dead it still stands and is likely to stand for some years more.
But it had to be propped up, for dead branches could well suddenly fall, and so a couple of years back aluminum supports were placed under the two branches that leaned out over the grass. That was when the base was cemented, and then space left round that block of cement and a little wall built to hold in the water. That wall on the west is a bit higher, for it has beyond it the enclosure constructed for the tortoise that walked in during the first months of coronavirus, and though she kept climbing over and was taken away to a forest when curfews were less intense, the enclosure still stands, and now hosts the ambarella tree as well as the old pink bath tub which was my grandmother’s, and then for many years now has been the home of Kavi’s enormous pink gourami – as was indeed mentioned in the parallel account of water features.
The first picture here gives a clear idea of the situation of that tree now, of the base which supports it underneath, of one of the aluminium props, and of also an orchid blooming on the branch this prop supports. You can also see the ambarella tree when it was very small beyond the wall of the enclosure, and then right at the back the triangular basin which I had intended for roses. It is bare in this picture, taken in March last year, but as was seen last week it is now full of multicoloured bushes.
In the second picture you see it too, with a bush that is I think the impatiens flowers I put there when I gave up on roses. Those did flower, though in this picture from July last year there are no blossoms. However you see the anthuriums that surround the bases for the aluminium props for the two branches, while in the enclosure you can see how the ambarella tree has grown in just four months. You also see there the crab claws that almost always provide a touch of red or orange to the garden, while in the first picture there were the delightful purple blossoms on a tree my cousin Theja gave me when the garden was set up. She said we had had a tree of this sort in the front garden earlier, though I fear I have no recollection of that.
I had planned to also talk today about the other dead tree in the garden I set up five years ago, but I have got carried away by this corner so that requiem, for it was a long drawn out death, will have to wait. Instead I show here the little basin, first when there was one rose there, and then where there were several, with also a bush of impatiens flowers that Sunil had placed there.
And finally I show the anthuriums on the other side, those that hang over the pink bath tub, which has ferns and shrubs on the other side while behind it is the ehala tree.
With the new fish in place in the little pond under the eastern flower bed on the balcony, I decided to build a little vantage point, for the step from which one accessed the stair to the roof garden was too small to sit on comfortably and too high to see properly into the pool.
So I had a little seat set into the square of greenery I had put in there, seen in the fourth picture. It is just a little bit higher than the outer wall of the green, and that was low enough for me to command a good view of the surface of the tank. The first picture today then shows the seat, and the next the three black fish, with three companions, taken from this seat.
Though not strictly necessary, for the little step next to it also suffices, the seat also provides a bird’s eye view of the baskets in which Janaki tries to cultivate the lotus seeds from the little pond. That has produced several blossoms, as I have shown, and though the majority of seeds that develop long after the petals have fallen are dud ones, a few have germinated. And one plant in a basket kept on the balcony floor looked in time quite splendid. I show it looking as though it could safely be moved, but I fear the move was not successful, and after a few days it ceased to produce shoots.
Since the water might prove a breeding ground for mosquitoes, I put in there a few little fish, and took great delight in seeing them there of a morning. Unfortunately I did not take pictures of them while the plant was doing well, so the fourth picture shows another basket with only little sprigs of green, which of course means you can see the fish clearly. But only two are here, for there was a little hollow where they would lurk, and one of them was very shy.
Then however I found that the green was just weeds, and two of the little fish there vanished, so I thought it best to restore the other to the tank under the flower bed from which he had been taken. I had been able to do that because, to my surprise and joy, the big black fish there, Black Maurices Kavi called them, had produced offspring, lots of them, tiny to begin with but soon enough they grew to be distinctly visible. The next two pictures show one of them at the bottom, and then several, when they had got more confident, with the three older ones at the top.
The seat, as can be seen in the first picture, was matched by another at the other end, and that was because I was thinking of yet another pond, this one built under the seat that is against the eastern wall, next to the little bed for a single rose tree at the corner, which abuts on the other side the small lotus pond. And soon enough I built that, and put there a few of the white fish which had been born last December in the waterfall pond. The last two pictures here show them disporting themselves, which they did very happily from the time they were placed there. Â Â
I wrote last week about two of the trees I planted in my garden in December 2021, an ambarella and a mango tree. Both are doing well, though this is not the case with the another I planted at the same time. This was a pomegranate tree which did well to start with, but has been static for some time. The problem may lie in its being in the path of the water that pours down from the balcony when there is heavy rain. We angled the pipe on the edge of the balcony to avoid that, but it overshoots when there is torrential rain, and of that there has been far too much recently.
And the problem was exacerbated by the quantities that came down when I was putting up little tanks on the balcony, for they had to be drained when coconut husks had drawn out the aura of cement, and subsequently when the tanks are cleaned. So I only show this plant here when it was about six months old, and doing better than the other two trees.
I mentioned too the lime plant that died almost straight away, but the divul tree which was planted in January 2022 did struggle on for a year, and I show it when, having seemed dormant for ages, it produced a few new shoots. When those faded I moved it to near the ambarella tree, but it did not last very long there.
But what has seemed to work here are shrubs, which I have placed in several places. Most impressive of all are those in the basin behind the temple flower tree pond, where I had first tried roses and then impatiens flowers. Though those flourished initially, they died down and I think the lack of sun made it difficult there for flowers.
So I planted on one edge a lovely little green and white leaved plant that Janaki had sourced and also placed near the waterfall pond, and then a dark leaved shrub I bought. Those are both doing well, but they are overshadowed by a cutting Janaki brought from a basin on the roof garden of a purple and green shrub that did so very well that it now hangs dramatically over the bed.
In addition, in the space that had been created beyond the mango tree, when I confined the shrubs against the south wall to a narrower space by carefully defining their boundary with bricks, I thought I should try to develop a carpet of green. I have hopes that the grass will spread in that direction, but I thought too to replicate what I had done in the balcony, where I created a little square where whatever we put in took root. It boasts a carpet now of mukunuwenna, which rejoices in the name I find of sessile joyweed.
Also, the bed of now roses on the east had been covered with undupiyali, which it seems is rather unfairly called beggar weed. I needed to remove that to give the roses more space and soil, but I did not want it destroyed, so I moved a heap of that too down. Benjy and Lara dug away at it, but a few plants survived, and within a couple of weeks they had spread. This can be seen in the last picture which shows both these weeds, separated by a little curry leaf tree, with at the bottom edge the husks that are around the mango tree.
The two angels I had moved from the big pond to the smaller one on the balcony had initially seemed happy, along with the red and pink fish that had been there almost from the start. But I had noticed just before the catastrophe that they did not come up so readily for food as they had initially done, and I thought that perhaps I should remove some of the weed. But I had not done this, and now one was dead, though thanks to Janaki the other had survived. The other fish in that pond all survived for much longer, except for one platy whom I missed, and just recently I have not seen the platies at all. But the pink fish, tetra I believe, still continue happy, and I think I even saw all six of them one morning, though usually not more than four appear at the same time.
I put the rescued angel in the new little tank, and Kavi wondered whether he had perhaps attacked the little ones now, with some atavistic memory of how they had been the reason for him being driven from his original home. But interesting as that theory was, I think the little angels had died long before that.
Kavi however told me he seemed uncomfortable there, and he moved him back to the pond where he had been for the previous months. And though I kept a little pondweed there for shelter, I soon replaced it with a new lotus plant. That has appeared before, but I show it again here, shortly after it was after it was put in place, with a blossom and next to it a couple of yellow roses in the little bed next to it, the precursor of all the building for fish and flowers last year on the balcony. And in the foreground is a pot with I think the pink roses that later I moved up to the roof garden.
The angel back there seems entirely happy now, and comes up quickly for food every morning though not together with his companions. I have two pictures of a morning feeding, first the pink and red fish that would come up quickly, and then the angel who loomed up later, with one pink fish beside him and another moving away, with a lotus leaf between him and the other two.
Meanwhile, though I was a bit worried about the disappearance of the little black angels, I thought I should put in some more fish there, to liven up the place. When I dropped food in there of a morning, the two sari guppies popped up at once, chasing each other’s tail, and soon enough the three little black fish hove in sight too. The second platy however was difficult to see, and in the last picture here I show only the other five.
I have shown in the last couple of weeks tall trees in my garden and my driveway, including one planted relatively recently, the kohomba tree that is now higher than the balcony and even the roof garden.
But a couple of years back I planted more trees there, having been sent a whole set of plants by a friend. Five were placed in the garden here with two more being taken to Palankadewatte. Of the five the lime tree died soon and the divul tree, after a valiant struggle and transplanting too, also gave up. But three remain, and of them two are doing very well.
Much taller than me now, though planted only in December 2021, is the ambarella tree. I placed it within the enclosure built in 2020 for the tortoise that walked in during coronavirus, in a spot that got lots of sun, and there it grew in leaps and bounds and produced fruit in just over the year, and has since flowered three times more, with fruit of various sizes having emerged from the buds.
Then there was a mango tree which took some time to develop, but then began to throw up new leaves and soon enough new branches, though these leaned over in an effort to catch the sun. So a few months back I trimmed the overhang of the bushes against the wall on the south side of the garden, which had hung over it, and in fact restricted their space by pushing back the line of bricks that demarcated it.
That was done in June, but I took no pictures at the time, so all I have to show the order that was restored to that part of the garden is a picture taken soon afterwards showing Benjy and Lara outfacing each other against the background of the waterfall pond with the mango tree to the right and behind it a well demarcated set of shrubs beyond.
But before that I have the two trees, the ambarella and then the mango, taken six months after they were planted, when they were still quite small. Two months later the ambarella was bigger, as the next picture shows, with behind it the crab claws placed against that western wall in flower. And then the mango tree too started to throw out new shoots, which I show nine months later, I think the second efflorescence. As if in competition, at the same time the ambarella tree had not just new shoots, but also flowers.
Two months later, during the New Year break when I wandered much in my garden, there were more shoots on the ambarella tree and the mango tree had shot up, so that you see in the penultimate picture tiny shoots on top of the tree. On the picture of the ambarella tree one of the fruits of the first flowering can be seen clearly on my right.
And then the last picture, as I have noted, was taken two months later, showing the bricks that confine the shrubs which diverted the mango tree from the upright stance it deserves.
Rajiva Wijesinha 