You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2023.
Let us end the year though on a positive note, following my account last week of the death of the angel who had lived most of his life with me in the little pond on the balcony. He had been moved with his mate from the big pond when the other pair spawned, and they had seemed a threat. But the small pond was too congested then and one of those moved died, and the other was only just saved.
When he came back though, after some time in a smaller tank, he did well, but I was thinking of moving him, when there were lotus plants to provide shelter, to the new big pond by the garage, which I showed a couple of weeks ago. Before I could do that however he was gone.
So he was not to be reunited with the babies whose parents had seen him as a threat all those months ago. It was some of them that I finally moved, after much effort, for Kithsiri was able only to catch one, when we first tried, a comparatively little black one, and then Kavi after much effort got just three, two big white ones and an even bigger one with a touch of gold.
But that seemed enough, and they all seem quite happy in their new home. They are not easy to catch on camera though, unlike the white catfish I had put in earlier, who dart about the place enthusiastically, and not only when food is dropped in.
Also readily visible are the four tiger barbs I put there along with the catfish, two ordinary striped ones and two described as green, with a large patch on their sides. They tend to lurk near the front of the pond, against the thick clear glass that Kithsiri managed to procure.
The black mollies I had put there initially had all died in those early days, save for one whom I am convinced was one of those from the lotus basin. And it is he I think who is most prominent still, by the front of the tank, accompanied at times by one of the other two whom I added in later along with the angels.
And the lotus plant soon spread all over the pond It was a little one, whose flowers do not rise much above the surface, along which its leaves float. And I was worried because it lies low about whether blossoms would get sun. But as I was advised by the lady who sold it to me, they will seek the open air, and within a day the bud that was highest broke the surface and soon blossomed.
And though it drooped after a few days and did not open, as had happened to plants of that type I had put into the tubs in the garden, almost immediately another bud rose to the surface. And within a couple of days it blossomed, though this happens only in sunlight, and by evening it folds up and falls asleep.
I had, of course, while the workmen were with me, to do more, and I also suggested a few raised beds all over the place, two against the south wall, another under the guest bedroom to the north, and a fourth also on that side, against the bathroom, between the water tap and the cement covering of the water motor. The inspiration for these was the raised bed which Ranji had built on his own the last time the workmen were here, at the back against the wall that separates the area where the new building is from the driveway. That can be seen again in the last picture here.
The first picture shows the bed at the western end of the south wall. It was built against the pond around the temple flower tree, and I kept it low so that there would be no spillover into the water, for that was where the white fish that have spawned there twice shelter their little ones.
In front of the bed is an acquisition from Roshanara, which I brought over before that property was sold. It is a very solid garden bench, and having first thought of setting it against that south wall I put it forward, under one of the climbing trees that formed the border of the lawn. The trunk of that tree is within the little bed, as is the ginger plant next to the pond.
The other bed on the south side is at the corner, against the west wall too. It abuts on the seat I built round the dying mango tree, which you can just about discern through the leaves of the shrub in front. As I have mentioned earlier, the mango tree finally collapsed, and the space was bricked in, though Ranji painted that with a design to suggest the contours and the bark of the tree.
That bed should have been higher, but I was away when this was done and Somapala made it the same height as the other. So for the moment I use the space to pile up branches we cut, and when the wall has been raised, a foot or so to come near the round seat, I will fill it up with earth and start planting. But I fear that since that area does not get sun, it will only be shrubs, as in the raised triangle on the other side of the temple flower tree pond, colourful ones which I show again today in the fourth picture here.
Somapala also forgot to build the bed I had wanted next to the bathroom, but the other against the bedroom looks good. That catches a bit of sun in the morning, so I thought that I could try to place roses there. Unfortunately, with the incessant rain, the garden centres have not got supplies, though in one I did manage to find a couple of plants. And though they had blossoms when I planted them, by the time I took pictures these had fallen away. So there are only leaves in the third picture here and the bed looks bleak, but perhaps when there is more sun there will be colour there.
For my penultimate post in this series this year I will get back to my lotus ponds on the balcony, the subject with which I began the series, but which I have neglected since the end of September. There was a host of blossoms at that time, but though not so profuse, this continued over the next few months.
So in October there were blossoms in both the little pond and the bigger one, and these appear first in the pictures. Then in November I cannot recall anything in the little pond, but the picture shows two blossoms in the big pond, and the next has one of them in full flower, the day before I left. But sadly Janaki told me that the other one, which had been very little in the picture taken two days earlier, had not blossomed.
I suspect there is a beast around who bites these buds, for the bud I found on my return, seen in the next picture, was truncated a couple of days later. I had found it lurking behind the gutter, for there had been just a stalk thrusting its way up towards the tiles and it was only when I gently drew it forward that I saw this quite perfect specimen. Unfortunately I kept it there, thinking it would do well in the sun, but then it fell prey to a predator.
I am sure it was a predator, for the angels there only came up slowly that morning, and in the little pond the fish were nowhere to be seen. Earlier they were on the surface when I went up in the morning, but on this day they had clearly been traumatized, for it took them ages to emerge after I had dropped in some food.
But nothing had happened to the bud that had been there the day I got back, though it is close to the balcony wall and could well have been preyed upon. And then, in less than a week, it had blossomed, only just but beautifully so. As I have previously noted, the blossoms here take a long time to come to fruition, and it took six days from what you see in the seventh picture to become what appears next.
But there has been disappointment too, for on that first day there was also a little bud in the pond. But having got just a little bit taller, it ceased to develop. And then real tragedy struck, for the angel who had survived there on his own for several months finally gave up. This was while I was away, and Janaki said he had been fine in the morning when she fed the fish, but later that day she found him dead.
Absurd to sorrow much for a fish, but he was the first I looked for when I went up to the balcony, for I had known him I felt for aeons, and I had pride in how he had survived so much movement. And after the trauma he had been the first to emerge, so that in the days before I went away I had been delighted to see him.
But I took no pictures in those few days, so it is an earlier one I show, before a picture of his burial. In that picture you see also the little bud that failed to develop, and up on the top right you see my now lost angel.
I go down now to the main garden, or rather, first of all, to an area I have not looked at before. This is the little strip of land at the back, which was generally covered from view by the garage, the old one, and now the new one. But of course above the new garage is the new building, with balconies at the back. Now that I have taken to walking on the upper floor, my different circuits involve both balconies there, and so I have a much better view of that area.
And I was struck earlier this month by the flowers on the mango tree just behind the bedroom which abuts on the boundary wall. There are two there, and I had to cut a lot of branches, for the building and also later when they had thrust themselves forward again. But they are still magnificent, and keep putting forth new shoots. For the first time too I was able to see the flowers, and the first picture here is of them. They are interwoven with the plantain leaves that have shot up very high there, and which have provided us with lots of fruit in the past.
In the second picture I show the second mango tree, which is behind what remains of the old staff quarters, now converted to a quaint cottage with the addition of a part of the garage which became a bedroom. But you see nothing of that, the balcony that looks onto that area being off the pantry of the upper floor, matching the balcony that is further in of the little bedroom.
Before I noticed the delightful flowers on the mango tree, there was another set of unusual flowers in the main garden, when suddenly the Kandyan Dancer orchid burst into flower. Long ago, when I set up that garden, in 2018, Kavi had gifted me a couple of plants, but they only produced one blossom at a time, and that too for just a couple of years. This was on the ehala tree, and though the plant placed at the back of the house did better, that too was fallow for ages. And then even the purple orchid on the temple flower tree, though it did produce a few blossoms, also seemed to give up.
A few months back we decided to move these orchid plants and others Janaki had got to the trees at the back of the garden, against the west wall, which does catch sun in the afternoons. But nothing seemed to happen for ages, and I was giving up hope when suddenly there were two shoots of flame there, and a host of Dancers, captured in the third picture.
Later that month the workmen came back for some repairs in the house, but also what I had thought necessary after the break in, the raising of the garden walls. This was done through netting, going up several feet on all three sides where there are neighbours, and it looks as good as could be expected, as we see in the last two pictures.
They are both taken from the little corridor outside my bathroom upstairs, one from the window that looks west to the porch and the wall which separates my garden from the part that went to my sister, the other from the window that looks south, over the pond under the temple flower tree, with the area belonging to my brother on the right.
And there was another pond to add fish to when I got back from Greece at the beginning of this month. This is down below, in front of my seat outside the garage. A few months back Ranji had the bright idea, when they were clearing up after the last major work on the new building, of setting up an elevated flower bed in the space behind the wall by the driveway, and I have much enjoyed seeing the shrubs and flowers which Janaki put in there, and have indeed shown some of them, albeit several weeks ago, in the companion piece about my gardens which appears on Wednesdays.
I thought then of adding a counterpart on the side by the garage, but Kavi then suggested we put a tank there, which struck me as an excellent idea. So when the workmen were here last month, to work on raising the garden wall, I got them to build a tank here, and that was actually completed before I left. But then of course it had to be filled with husks to take away the fumes of the cement, and it was only when I got back that these were discarded and fresh water put in.
This now seems the best place to move some of my angels, but as with the upper tank, it is best to have some lotus plants sheltering them. Unfortunately the lady who had supplied me with the flowers that are doing so well on the upper balcony has not had tall plants for some time, so I will have to wait. But meanwhile the water needs fish, to prevent mosquitoes breeding.
I have shown previously the little basins in which Janaki placed lotus seeds, and how they sprouted, though all died away. I had wondered if this was because I had moved them too quickly into ponds, but the last one that had produced a couple of new little shoots just earlier had also vanished by the time I got back from Greece.
After a couple of days in a pond when the leaves seemed to droop, I had moved it to the window sill of my dining room where it caught some sun. I put in a couple of little black mollies, but two of them vanished in rapid succession, and after that I looked out for their two replacements anxiously every morning, having also placed slates on the basin to protect them. This required a careful balancing act, since I also needed to make sure there was sun for them.
To my enormous relief, they were both there when I got back, though the lotus shoots had gone. I moved them then to the big tank outside the garage, and added four more, and they soon got quite confident and disported themselves all over the place.
But I do worry about them, and count them anxiously every morning when I feed them. A couple of days after they went there, it seemed there were only five of them, but then later that day the sixth re-emerged. But then the next day I found the littlest dead at the bottom of the tank.
The second picture is of him being buried under the little rosemary plant that is in a pot on the border of the tank. But before that I show the fish on their first day there, so they are still very much at the bottom, gliding along while Rocky has his yoghurt.
After that I show the two fish in the basin on my window sill with a green lotus shoot and then the basin on the balcony, with the fish but no clear evidence of a lotus plant in the midst of the greenery that had spread on the surface of the mud. And I end with a picture in which you can see four of the fish in the new pond, along with the basin in which two of them had survived for so long.
It was six weeks ago that I wrote about the flowers on the balcony, and that was just in one post, for I was keen to move up to the profusion of roses in the roof garden. But I did show the profusion of roses in the bed on the east of the balcony, with its three bushes, orange and pink and then a deeper orange. And I also showd the other bed, in the southwest corner, with pink and orange roses.
The first plant in the eastern bed was bleaker than the other two in October, but by November it had produced a few blossoms, and I show them first, a single flower and then two, taken from the top of the stairs to the roof garden. In that picture you see also two roses in the pink bush in the middle, and I show those blossoms in close up in the third picture.
And meanwhile, as I mentioned in that last post, the bush on the west, against the wall of the stairway to the balcony, was also doing its bit, and it actually produced unusually two blossoms together. You see those from the north and then from the south, where you can also see the seat beyond which is my vantage point for feeding the angels and looking at the bed opposite on the east side.
Then I cannot resist one more picture of the tall orange plant in that bed, two blossoms, a couple of days before I left for Greece. And by the time I got back, in December, that plant had no flowers. But waiting for me were a host of pink blossoms in the bed in the southwest corner. I show them and a close up of one, which I think is from there, though by then there was also I think a blossom in the bed on the east.
And there were incipient buds in the tall plant, and just a couple of days ago the one over the edge of the bed flowered. You see that in the last picture, with another bud beyond it, and below is a pink blossom in the little plant next to it. Unfortunately there are no blossoms nor even buds on the taller orange plant on the other side of this bed, nor on the orange plant in the southwest bed, but little red shoots have appeared so I live in hope.
And so too in the pot which had white roses, of which thought generally only one emerges at a time. There is nothing however in the red bush in the west, and in fact there was another of those long shoots which just grow and grow and come to nothing, so that had to be pruned. Still, I cannot complain, for there has been enough colour, to say nothing of the lotus blossoms, to go with my coffee when I feed the fish up there in the mornings.
I mentioned last week Kavi’s advice about moving the two white gourami that remained from the lotus pond, and that was done the next day. Some months back I had built another tank on the balcony just outside my dining room, the balcony that had been expanded from the narrow one that led off the blue bathroom which had served my parents’ bedroom at the front of the house upstairs as well as the dark little bedroom next to it which was mine in my childhood.
When the house was partitioned, both those rooms went to my sister, but the bathroom remained with me. In the past the balcony off it had been cut off from the room along which it ran when mesh was put into the windows that overlooked it, as a security measure. But later the mesh nearest the bathroom was removed, for my mother when that room became the dining room built a sink on the balcony, to which plates were passed for washing through the window.
That window became a door when the house was partitioned, the middle double window was walled up, and the further window became a door into my new study. Both the balcony and the study were thrown out further over the porch over the entrance to my section of the house, which was through the old corridor that led from the back of the house.
The study had a rounded wall next to the balcony, which allowed me windows on three sides on the pattern of the old front lounge. And then last year I built a tank against the rounded portion of the wall nearest the dining room, so that I could have both fish and lotuses to gaze on while I ate.
But none of the little lotus plants I placed there survived, those I bought and those in little basins where Janaki had cultivated seeds from my other plants. There were little shoots of lotus plant at times, but for the most part there were just fish, little ones to prevent mosquitoes breeding. F
I had thought of the tank initially to house some of the angels which had developed in profusion in the upstairs big tank, but I did not want to put them there without the shelter of plants such as they had in their birthplace. But now I thought that the large gourami could survice without such shelter, though it did seem necessary to put a little net on top and weigh it down, since I fear we are beset by prowling polecats, and I have seen their mark on the balcony upstairs, with recently a lotus bud bitten across and the fish there apparently traumatized for they took ages to emerge to be fed.
So it was with due precaution that the two big white gourami, clearly orange now and much larger than when I bought them, were placed there. The first picture shows them as they appear when I sit in my place at the dining table, and it also gives a much clearer idea than my description above does of the layout of this enlarged balcony with study to the left and on the right the door to the room which was put up so the bathroom would not continue in isolated splendour.
The second picture is a close up which shows the two fish at two sides of the tank, while the little bit of gold in between them at the top of the tank is one of the little platies also there. I had had four, which survived for some months and you can see two of them in the third picture, along with a lotus stalk. But now I added several more from the temple flower pond. The fourth picture just shows two little fish, the first I put in there when the tank was built, in July. They alas did not survive. And then finally you see the two white gourami in their original home, the lotus pond downstairs, a couple of months back.
I have over two weeks shown nine flowering rose trees in my roof garden, and there are still more to show from that memorable Saturday in early November. These are the flowers on the eastern border of the roof garden, a bed with three trees just on the right of the stairway as you look down, then a pot with the variegated bush I got in Ingiriya on my first visit to the new centre there, and then, after a bed with mainly impatiens flowers another pot, with white roses.
All these trees were in full flower, their blossoms a riot of colour. The first plant, near the stairs is the reddish orange one that was planted early this year, which has never really failed, but this time it had heaps of flowers. You see these in the first picture, and then beyond them the taller tree which preceded it, which has pink roses verging on white, though whether they began as pink or as white I cannot now recall. That plant is a beacon of hope, for its flowers are easily seen from the balcony, a solace when I cannot go up to the roof garden.
The same is true of the yellow roses beyond it, though you can see just a couple in this first picture. Most noticeable is the flower that sticks out against the wall of the balcony below, though its colour is such as to be subsumed between the grey of the cement and the green of the leaves.
You can see them also in the second picture, one flower prominent above the rail of the stairway, to the left of Kavi who was bringing up water for the plants, unnecessary as it turned out for it rained again that night. There are other blossoms too on that plant, but you do not notice them at first for the focus of this picture is the pot with lots of yellow flowers, of a slightly different shade, along with one speckled red rose, like the ones in the pot at the northern edge of this row, next to the stairs.
This pot as you can see has lots and lots of blossoms, and so does the next pot along, pink ones, seen clearly against the balcony of the other part of Lakmahal. I have two pictures of these, the second highlighting their beauty, with beyond them the white flowers of the temple flower tree in the next garden.
The next picture shows on their own the orange flowers I spoke about first today, seen against the wall of my own balcony below. After that you have a close up of one of the pink flowers next to these, to show the perfection of its formation, with behind it the orange flowers. Finally you have a panorama of the flowers mentioned today plus those in the big basin on their right.
I got back home yesterday after two weeks away, having worried more now when I travel than I used to do when I was younger. This has a lot to do with increasing age, but it is also because I miss more and more what I have left behind. How this happened I have started to explore in the Tuesday post on my Facebook page, about my animals and other family, so I will content myself here with recounting the sheer joy of coming back to what is familiar, and noting the changes, revelling in continuity and enhancement.
But there can also be sadness. While I was away Janaki told me that the remaining white or rather pink gourami in the pond under the ehala tree had died, and though I told her to bury it she had kept it for me, in the freezer. I was happy to see him once again, looking as lovely as ever, and we buried him this morning in one of the new little beds I had had constructed in the garden, this one under the window of the downstairs big bedroom which I had occupied for a quarter of a century.
The first picture shows him on the bench outside the garage, to which she brought him while I was sitting there with Rocky and his yoghurt, and the second shows him under the plant where he now lies.
Janaki had no idea how he died, for there were no injuries on him, and as I have shown previously that pond was covered with netting ever since his companion vanished, as did two red carp. But Kavi told me later that he thought it was perhaps time to move the other two white gourami from the old lotus pond, for they were growing bigger, and perhaps there was not enough water and not enough space, and their fins were getting damaged.
Kavi is convinced that these white gourami, as they were called when I bought them, are the same as the massive pink gourami he has nurtured for years, and whom he had got nursed back to health when he seemed to suffer after the pink tub he has been in for years was affected by the building. His fish doctor told him that he needed company if he was not to continue aggressive, and Kavi’s uncle gave me a pair of delightful large grey fish with whom the pink gourami seems to have co-existed happily, in the tub now transposed to the tortoise enclosure.
I have showed the fish there in the past, but recently the water had been muddied, and though the pink gourami was always visible given both size and colour, it took me time to see the other two when I fed them in the morning. But while I was away Kavi had cleaned the tub, and they all three looked splendid there today, as can be seen in the third and fourth pictures.
And he had also cleaned the upright tank I spoke about last week, so that the fish there are easier to see, as is the head of a statue I had placed there and which Kavi put centre stage. In the first picture you see the white catfish on the side, with four of his companions, and in the last picture just three fish but also two of the little animals that entertain them and me.
Rajiva Wijesinha 