Saying it with flowers: Here is why there is a spring in Lutyens’ step

NEW DELHI: It’s almost like Mother Nature herself laid out luminescent rangolis across the breadth of Delhi using the most vibrant of colours — the sunniest yellow, bloodiest red, most royal blue, utterly seductive purple, the happiest green and the purest white. These floral carpets in central Delhi, rolled out with a little help from humans, are where citizens are headed to, eager to enjoy that short period of salutary weather before the enervating winds of summer start to blow.
Talkatora Garden could well be a chunk of Uttarakhand’s Valley of Flowers transported to an urban scenario with its geometric patterns of pink, yellow, scarlet, magenta and white.And Chanakyapuri looks like a brightly dyed tribal shawl, cleaved into halves by the dark grey of Shanti Path. All the roundabouts are resplendent, none more so than Matthew Circle at the Akbar Road-Tughlaq Road crossing, where rays of red and white petunias emerge from a circle of yellow and blue to end at multi-hued tangents, like an elaborate pattern on the flag of a fun-loving country.

“This pleasant halfway zone between a harsh winter and an unforgiving summer is when the capital looks its best and we have worked hard to ensure our parks and roundabouts are at their finest,” said S Chellaiah, horticulture director, New Delhi Municipal Council. “We planned much of it in October — from introducing new floral themes to redeveloping fountains and importing American hybrid seeds.”

At Talkatora, the civic body shed the conventional garden architecture and opted for a trimmed carpet look on both sides of the fountains. “Earlier, we grew dahlia and salvia, but the height of these plants was uneven and made it difficult to give the place a uniform appearance,” said an NDMC official. “We decided to plant hybrid petunia in five shades and combined them with pansy and dwarf salvia to give the stretches a synchronised look.” The changes were initially criticised, but the officials have been vindicated by the orderly beauty of the blooms.
The Matthew Circle is a flower lover's seasonal delight. The glorious bunching of petunia, antirrhinum, dianthus, pansy and larkspur against the golden green of the grass offer a colourful counterbalance to the driftwood ‘trees’, branched planters, pots made of recycles tyres and topiary bushes.

“Some of the flowering plants, like petunias and violas, will last until the end of April, after which summer plants will take over. But the coreopsis is long-lasting and will remain till well into summer," said the official.
When TOI visited Nehru Park, it was to find admirers like Amesha Goswami of Sarojini Nagar rapt in the beauty of spring. The ‘flower veil’ developed on an elevated acre of land with seven shades of petunia and yellow pansy, surrounded by oriental lilies, is an instant attraction. “This is my third visit here with my family in the last two week,” Goswami said. At Lodhi Garden, the vertical garden and kaleidoscopic baskets are popular selfie points that direct the senses to more traditional features like the viola patch along the lotus pond in the butterfly garden.
For these few weeks, it is hard to imagine that Delhi is the capital of a land of heat and dust.