My Roof Garden on top of the rest 30

I have not written since August about my actual garden, down below, with its several ponds. Those of course figure here on Saturdays, but as I have shown there are lots of lovely trees down there, and occasionally flowers bloom. But I start today with neither flowers nor trees, but rather with an unexpected visitor in early September.

This was a peacock, who for a month or so haunted the neighbourhood so that my neighbours across the road – whose house like ours has been divided so that the only member of the family who lives there is far from us, with his front door on Duplication Road – said it had visited them too. This visit to my garden was a protracted one and, though I could not capture him on the grass, from which he flew up the moment I opened the door, he pottered for ages on the boundary wall.

The first picture shows him framed between the two trunks of the dead temple flower tree, and the second has him on a jutting out wall belonging to the neighbour at the back, with the new skyrise at the back and, more hearteningly, the bush with bright yellow leaves in front.

The next picture is an aerial view of the temple flower tree with the pond beneath it, but the focus is Lara, looking into the tortoise enclosure which she does often every day. You can see the little pond on the near side and then, through shrubbery, the pink bath tub where Kavi’s big pink gourami lives, together with the two companions given me by his uncle for Christmas.

The next picture is of the shrubs in the triangular basin beyond the pond, against the wall where the peacock was. There are three variegated varieties there, the little green and white one on the right taken from plants elsewhere in the garden, the middle long leaved one bought specially, as was the other which has spread widely, though that was bought for the roof garden and it was lucky that Janaki thought to place here a little plant from there.

Next I show a shrub that Mala Weerasekera gave me which she said spread profusely. I placed it next to the pink bath tub on the other side, beneath the ehala tree, and it did spread, though Benjy and Lara have made depredations upon it so that there is less than there was before they arrived. But this specimen is I think quite delightful, though I fear the netting I had to place over the tub slightly spoils its effect.

Finally I show little plants that I placed on the other side of the garden, below the place where the peacock displays himself in the second picture. These are grass as well as herbs that grow in profusion on the balcony, both in the little space I created for them and also in the rose beds so that they have to be weeded regularly. But instead of throwing that excess away, I uprooted them, with much help from Janaki and Kavi, and transferred them to the area outside the brick border where grass did not grow, and they did well. The recent rains created some problems, but much of this greenery has survived, a relief since Benjy and Lara have dug up much of the grass in the garden proper.