Water Features 24

I had intended this week to move down to the ponds in the garden but suddenly last week there were three buds in the bigger pond on the balcony, in addition to the one in the smaller pond, and then a couple of weeks ago one of the former blossomed. It was a great joy to see this, and as the second picture shows I took great pleasure in taking in its heady honeyed scent.

Fortunately there were one or two days that were comparatively dry so that I could relish that balcony instead of being able to pay only a cursory visit of a morning to feed the fish.

The first picture shows the blossom just as it was opening on the morning of the 27^th, which is when I sat by it for ages. The third picture shows it the next morning, when the wind had already blown down the lowest petals. And this morning it is no longer fresh, the shelf life of these double lotus blossoms rarely extending beyond a couple of days.

After those four different pictures of that flower, you see first the other two buds in that pond, though I feared yesterday, having tracked it over a few days, that the littlest may not come to fruition. So it seemed today too, but miraculously there had sprung up between that, and the one in front, which has grown taller day by day yet another bud. This, though I had not noticed it yesterday, is already taller than the little one so it looks as though it will succeed in reaching further up and opening.

It will not I think be inhibited by the steps upward near where it is. The first big blossom had thrust itself through the steps, as was seen in the first picture. I show it again now, after today’s pictures, as I first saw it, last Sunday, after I had got back from a few days away. But it appears last of the three, because I show first the little bud on that day, the same size as it is today, and then after that the one in front, which is so very little in comparison with the height it has reached now.  

After the now flowering bud when I first saw it, I show its counterpart in the smaller pond, taken on the same day. It has not however developed as the other one did, for today’s picture which follows shows it certainly taller, certainly larger, but a far cry from blossoming. But while the incessant rain and wind to which it is more exposed may have something to do with this, what I think of now as the single lotuses in this pond are slower to develop anyway, just as they are slower to fade away.

Finally I show the blossoming lotus taken yesterday from the seat near the smaller pond, so that it is seen across the balcony, with below it the nurseries for what I hope will be new lotus plants and after that the bed on the east with its roses, though the blossoms can be seen as just blurs of colour at this distance.  

My Roof Garden on top of the rest 24

It was well over two months after I had last written about it that I moved last week to the flowers on the balcony. I had started there five years ago, and I showed several pictures of the first bush of red roses I placed there, which gave me great pleasure over four years and more before finally giving up.

While it was still there I put in a small bush of pink roses at the side of the same bed, and then when the big one died a white rose plant which however soon brought out pink ones. So I moved that, and replaced it with a plant that had orange flowers. Almost exactly three months ago I showed both pink roses and also an orange one.

But I did not show more of those bushes, so I start today with pictures of them in early days, separately in March (though it is possible the orange one will not appear) and then together in early June. And they continued to do well, so I show them again in August, again two splendid blossoms separately and then a picture of both plants in blossom together.

Unaccountably, unless it was that I had wanted to move swiftly to my garden below, I also failed to show the white rose bush that turned pink which had been where the orange plant now is. I had moved it when it proved itself pink to the bed on the east, where it lay between the orange verging on yellow plant to the north and the red verging on orange plant to the south.

I show it there in fine fettle last May, and then again in August. It has baby roses, which sometimes appear in clusters, which is a great joy as I sit opposite them on the seat against the staircase wall, next to the big lotus pond with its stock of many angels.

As I mentioned last week, it is next to that plant that I placed the second orange rose plant I bought earlier this month in Ingiriya. I showed the two plants and the other one last week from the side, and today I repeat all three, taken from the seat opposite.

After that, I show in the midst of celebration of fauna, a moment of sadness, when for the first time one of the angel babies, now grown, died in the tank in which it had been born. I had foolishly tried, prematurely, to move some of the little ones into other tanks, including the one below this bed on the east, and they had died, but that I thought had been my fault for interfering. This chap died naturally, and I saw him floating on the surface when I was on the seat to feed the angels.

I buried him then under the new rose plant, and the picture shows him under a blossom, with a bud also dimly discernible nearer to the fish. On the left is a pink blossom from the plant brought over from the first bed on the balcony.

Water Features 23

I indulged myself over the last two weeks with featuring just one of the two lotus ponds on the balcony on each Saturday. But there was good reason for this, for from April on, which is when I resumed coverage as it were of these ponds, they both produced blossoms in profusion.

This week too I have to concentrate on one pond, the larger one again, for the smaller one had no blossoms over the last couple of months. This was depressing, for the same thing had happened to it with regard to the first lotus plant I had placed there, which suddenly stopped flowering after doing so well initially. This time I thought, having been advised by my lotus lady, to use fertilizer, which I did last week, but I think that even before then the plant had decided to flower again. It was doubtless because of the relentless rains that it had ceased to do so, but last week I saw a tiny bud, and by the time I get back to Colombo I hope very much that it would have shot up as its predecessors did.

Meanwhile I will show the double lotus blossoms of the bigger pond,  which are glorious if one catches them as they open out, but which swiftly fade. But for some reason in August I also caught three of them just as the bud had reached its full extent and begun to open, but before it was in full blossom. That too was a beautiful sight, and I start with three of them, pictured on August 3^rd and then August 8^th and then August 21^st.

The first was at the back and to the left of the pond, the corner which had seen many buds in the preceding period. The next was a bit more to the right, and the third at the right edge, near the stairway to the roof garden.

The next three pictures show those incipient blossoms one day and two days and four days later. The fourth picture then captures a double lotus blossom at its best, when you see clearly the two layers of petals and the calyx peeping out. But then the next shows the petals beginning to droop, so that the calyx emerges clearly. And the last picture, taken on August 25^th, shows the petals fading, and slightly discoloured. Within a day or two they had all fallen, to float on the surface of the pond, just above the clustering angels.

And that alas was the last blossom, though leaves began to shoot up in September, as happened with the smaller pond. So I hope that here too a bud will soon emerge. Meanwhile I end with a couple of pictures of Janaki’s nursery, where seeds she planted have produced a plethora of leaves.

There are two of these basins, between the big pond and the small tank under the bed of roses on the east wall of the balcony. You see both in both pictures though the focus is on each in turn. And in both you see the little black fish from that small tank which I put there to stop mosquitoes breeding.

My Roof Garden on top of the rest 23

I was so delighted by the roses I had bought from the old man who had set up shop in Ingiriya that I was determined to get some more from him. He was not there when I dropped in at his shop last week, but his wife was as helpful, and I bought two plants with lovely blossoms. They were similar in colour, but that did not matter for one was intended for the long bed on the east side of the balcony, where the southernmost of the three plants I had there had died.

The other I wanted to place in the bed on the south west of the roof garden, to which I had transposed a couple of rose plants after one of those that Anuruddha had given me in May had been placed there. But what I had forgotten was that the soil there was not deep, and when I had brought plants from Ingiriya previously I had put them in pots, as I have shown, having transferred to the shallow bed the baby roses that had been in those pots previously.

The two plants I had transferred had in time produced new buds, and I start here with pictures of those, a yellow rose at the edge of the garden and then two white ones in the inner corner next to the seat on that side, white now though the plant had produced pink baby roses previously. The new plant that I bought, which needed deeper soil, I decided to put in the basin with the lime trees. I had earlier put in shrubs that provided colour there, but I had put there one of the plants I had bought in Ingiriya previously, though I failed to mention this last week.

I show next that plant, with a pink blossom, the day I placed it, on August 16^th, and there follows then the orange blossom I added to that bed just about a month later. As you can see, the shrubs have diminished, but I am not too upset since, once I decided to have roses here too, there will be colour. And, miraculously, it seemed to me, the kovakka plant, if I have the name right, suddenly produced flowers, a tall shoot with delightful long blossoms, which I show in the fifth picture.

The next picture is from the balcony, where the second orange plant I bought last week was placed. The first picture shows a bud turning into a blossom, which was what it had when I bought it, with a bud to its left. A couple of days later the blossom was perfect, though I show it with a dead angel I buried near this plant. For the first time since my angel babies had appeared last October, one of them died in their home pond.

The last picture shows that blossom still in fine fettle, while the little bud had developed and was now at the stage the other had been when I bought the plant.

Water Features 22

Lots and lots of lotus blossoms last week from the small pond on the balcony, and this week, so enamoured am I of these, there will be lots and lots from the bigger pond, the one half under the roof, where the many angels born nearly a year ago greet me each morning, clustering around the food I scatter in two or three places.

Once again I begin with pictures of the week just before I last posted about these flowers, a blossom with a bud on April 16^th and then two incipient blossoms on the 20^th, the latter picture with its blown lotus blossom perhaps showing what is in the first picture. The next picture is from the very next day, as I sit on the step going up, to relish the lotus now fully open, as well as the little fish in the small tank on the other side.

There are so many pictures of April because I took none of this pond in May. But on the 1^st of June there was a bud, which I show, with the blossom that developed slightly faded eleven days later. And then there began buds on the left of the tank, near the wall of the stairs coming up to the balcony, beside the tap.

This was a hazardous spot, for two buds failed to develop, perhaps because they were knocked against the wall by the wind, perhaps because in trying to twist forward to get at the sun they were two contorted to survive. But a third one did, and I show that in all its glory, after a picture of two tiny buds by the wall and the tap, and another of the further one which did develop up to a point, only to get bent, perhaps by wind, perhaps by some animal on the edge of the tank, perhaps because it tried too hard to move its head forward and out of the cover of the roof.

All this happened in July, and before I show the bud filling out, I show it just emerging, on July 20^th, framed against the corner made by the staircase wall and the roof. The grown up bud was taken on the 28^th, but meanwhile there had been a couple of blossoms on the other side of the tank.

Of these I show first a bigger bud than the little one in the corner, a picture taken on July 20^th, which like the other of the same day shows the angels clustered beneath for this was feeding time. And then I show three pictures taken at two day intervals from the 23^rd on, a bud, and its blossoming, and then another bud. Angels can again be seen in the last picture, a juxtaposition of fish and flowers that always thrills me/

The last two flowers shown here were further back I think than the bud of the 20^th, but I cannot be sure, for it seems too much to have had so many flowers together at the same time. But that was indeed a period of great fecundity for my flowers, as will be seen again when I move into August.

My Roof Garden on top of the rest 22

Soon after I got back from England I decided that I wanted still more roses for the roof garden. It was clear the barbaton daisies were not working in the corner bed in the south west of the garden, and when I found the rose Anuruddha gave me doing well there, I thought I might as well dedicate that bed too to roses.

I was going while returning from my next trip to the cottage to see if the various ladies I had bought roses from had any more. But on the way back, in Ingiriya itself, we found a new place open, and a delightful old man who obviously loved his plants, and also told me about caring for them, which I much appreciated. His advice to prune low when blossoms died has since borne fruit.

I bought three tall plants from him and decided when I got back to place them in the pots at the eastern edge of the garden, so I could see them from below. I had previously had what are termed baby roses in those pots, and I decided to move those to the bed at the other corner. So the yellow bush from the pot on the opposite corner, next to the stairway, and the pink bush from the pot that was south of the bed that was on the other side of the stairs, were taken out and replanted.

The plants I had got in Ingiriya had magnificent colours. The one I put on the left of the stairs was red and white striped, while in the other pot there was a hybrid plant which had the same shade but also bright yellow. I start with a picture of that plant, the day I planted it, and then show it two weeks later from the balcony below, exemplifying what I had wanted, a panorama from below. So you see there, next to the pot with the two colours, the yellow roses at the south end of the bed, the pink ones on the tall bush in the middle, and the orange one to the north.

And then I show it again two weeks later, with new blossoms, again of both colours, and beyond it the yellow roses in the long bed, and beyond it the pink ones. You cannot see orange blossoms beyond, nor the other pot, but that too had new blooms as the next picture shows. That was taken on this date, fourt weeks after that plant was put in place, as seen in the fifth picture.

Water Features 21

I have spent many weeks on the fish in my different tanks and ponds, so I thought it was time now to get back to flowers. It was with the ponds with lotuses on the balconies that I began this series, and since I have not looked at them for well over four months I thought I should show some of the joys that they have provided me with in this period.

I start with three pictures taken in April of the lotus blossoms in the little pond on the south side. These are dated the 7^th and 15^th and 16^th and 19^th, and show the progress of buds to blossoms. However I should note that these pictures were taken before my last post on the lotuses, which was put up on April 22^nd and perhaps I used some of them there. But many of the pictures from that post have vanished, since I had to cull my media library given the plethora of pictures uploaded since I started to post several times each week after coronavirus put a stop to other activity.

That last post looked however at both ponds, and I see none of these pictures amongst those that remain, so perhaps they were not used. They show two little buds, and then gone of them in blossom. The two pictures of that flower show how rapidly it moves from youth to middle age. And then the fourth picture, of the other bud, shows a flower in its adolescence.

The next picture also shows adolescence, nearly four weeks later, with the flower in bloom the next day, May 14^th. And then we move to two pictures again of the same flower, two days apart, again showing how swiftly it develops. Those were taken in the first week of June, and then a week later there was another blossom, shown on the verge of blooming, with full fruition two days later.

The joy this spate of blossoms over three months brought me was enhanced by the freshness of the morning, which is when I was usually there, to feed the fish, to look at the roses and often to revel in the rising sun. And the different trees in the background were also lovely to see, the massive temple flower tree cherished in childhood which is in the next garden, seen in the third picture and the last one, the kohomba tree which shot up in five years seen in different shades in the fourth picture and the sixth, with behind it the jak tree with which it competes for supremacy.

I like too to look at the contrast of this greenery with the red of the tiled roofs of the houses beyond, fortunately bungalows so that their individuality can be relished. And of course it is always a joy to look at the roof of Lakmahal itself, in the first picture the part that does not belong to me, with in front of it the big round balcony which was the inspiration of the little round balcony in which I sit.

My Roof Garden on top of the rest 21

It is time now to get back to my roof garden, which I last wrote about in June. That post appeared while in fact I was in England, and then when I got back I wrote for a few weeks about the balcony, before moving down to the main garden and its trees and flowers.

I realize it is time too to be more systematic, so I will try to write about the new developments over each month. This will not always be possible, for sometimes there are blank periods as when it rained heavily. But this was not the case in July, and I came back to find that the one of Anuruddha’s rose plants, which I mentioned having planted there in May, had produced new blossoms.

So I start with a lovely blossom that awaited me the morning of my return, in the bed at the corner, where I had first tried to cultivate barbaton daisies. The last of them can be seen fading away in the corner, with the leaves of another plant opposite, the bushes against the garden wall being framed between them.

I was going next to show a new bud in the big bed with the temple flower tree in which I had planted three of Anuruddha’s plants. They had been full of blossoms and now, going through my earlier posts, I find I had failed to show them. So I show here the three plants on the day I planted them, the nearest with splendid purple blossoms, then a dark red beyond, and to the left of that, under the trunk of the temple flower, a variegated blossom.

These had long faded by the time I left for England, but when I got back there was a little bud emerging, and I show that next, followed by its flowering a week later. To its left is one of the earlier plants, the white rose bush I had put there when I thought I would never be able to get white roses to grow in either of my upper gardens.

The next picture goes back to the morning of my return, and shows the bed on the east of the roof garden, with the orange red roses at the south end and the magnificent yellow ones at the north. The tall bush in between, which switched from white to red, had no blossoms on that day, though there was one ten days later as we see in the next picture, at the top right. The yellow blossoms had gone by then but an orange one remained.

Finally I show the lime tree basin, on the morning I returned and then ten days later from the other side. In the first picture you see the coloured shrubs on the borrom right, opposite the kovakka plant I have mentioned, and again you see them at the top against the background of the delicate roofs next door. But in neither picture can you see the coloured shrubs on the other side.

Water Features 20

I have mentioned previously the little white fish I transferred upstairs, to the second tank on the balcony, under the seat on the eastern side. In returning today to these fish, to talk about them in detail, I have a sad story to relate, in contrast to the successful transfer to the temple flower pond down below, where there are now little ones.

I put eight fish initially into the upper pond, and they seemed to do well, so I thought I should add some more. Indeed a couple of platies suddenly emerged there, very little ones, which surprised me for I had taken out the ones I had put there initially, to test the waters as it were before I put in the white ones I thought needed greater care. But perhaps those had spawned and I had not noticed.

But they were tiny, and I wanted something bigger, and a different colour, so I put in a few black and gold fish which had looked lovely in the tank where they were when I bought them. Sadly I have just one picture of them in their new home, the first one here, where they can be seen with the two little gold platies.

For they all died, one after the other, those in this tank and those I had put in the waterfall pond, and those in the other tank on the balcony, under the seat on the south side. The first who died up there seemed to have had his head bitten off, and I wondered whether a polecat had got at him but that seemed unlikely. And when they all died, without such mutilation as with the second of those in the second picture here, I decided that perhaps they had been sick from the start.

Meanwhile the two new ponds above became very cloudy, for the greenery I had put it had liquefied as it were, which Kavi said was because of the strong sunlight which hit those tanks in the afternoon. They got so murky that I could hardly see the fish, and when we cleaned them up I found that the six white fish I had put there had been reduced to four. But the two little gold ones were still there too.

Then I decided that I would transfer to this tank a few of the little black fish from the first tank on top, where the Black Maurices I had put there from the croton tree pink tub below had grown – themselves the children of those I had bought originally – and themselves spawned, profusely. So I put four of them in the second tank, but then Kavi, whom I had asked to keep an eye on them, said he saw none. He even looked in the pipe which provides an outlet, but there was no trace of them. Of those victims of my social engineering I have no trace then, but I show in the third picture some of the little ones in the other pond with their parents.

I wondered if the white fish had eaten them, but he thought that unlikely. But just in case I thought that any new fish I put in there should be bigger, so I transferred from two of the ponds below two biggish platies. By then I had noticed that there was only one of the little ones there too.

 But when I looked the next morning there were none. I was relieved when Kavi told me he had transferred a big one and the little one, but this was because the other big one was dead, and it seemed clear that he had been attacked by the white fish, and they were in the process of consuming them.

It was a horrible thought, that these little creatures were capable of such an enormity. I felt as though a snake had entered into the paradise I had developed with my fish and my flowers. It was no consolation to think that nature is indeed red in tooth and claw.