My garden: Srabani maitra cultivates thriving terrace garden with a wide variety of plants
Telegraph | 8 February 2025
Srabani Maitra is so modest speaking about her plants that one is rather taken aback on seeing her terrace garden. Not only does she grow all categories of plants — flowers, fruits, vegetables and cacti — but she has also built the overhead shed for the plants almost entirely by herself. And all this in only 10 years that she has been dabbling with greens.
It has been my lifelong desire to grow plants and now that I have the time and freedom to do so, am living it up! I’m growing everything from Pineapples and Cherries to Oranges and Dragon Fruits now. My potted Mango plant had two lovely fruits hanging and I was looking forward to submitting this plant in the flower show, but squirrels ate them up!
Squirrels are quite a menace on my terrace and sometimes break away not just fruits but entire branches. But there is one plant – the Palong Shak – that is so prolific that both squirrels and my family members together can’t exhaust it.
Despite the heat in summer, I have managed to grow even a zucchini and Apple plant. The latter has started bearing flowers and am waiting for its fruit. There are Tomatoes, Brinjals, Chikus, and Aamra, that bears fruit all year, even when the leaves have shed in winter.
I rarely buy plants; most in my collection have been picked up from roadside heaps discarded by others. One of my favourite plants — a cactus that stands tall and smart — was picked up from EC Block like this. It is a particularly thorny specimen, however, that gave me multiple pricks while bringing it home, but the final look now is worth it.
There are so many pots up there that I’ve never counted them. I work on them all afternoon but have got to dedicate different days to different sections, as it is not possible to tend to them all daily. My daughter has bought me a trolley to move heavy pots around the garden without having to lift them and it is perhaps because of these plants that we don’t need to use an air-conditioner in our apartment underneath.