Today I intend to speak about how you can create a flower garden following the Miyawaki Model. Many wanted to know about and see how it is done. What you see here is a Miyawaki flower garden in an conical and sloping patch of land that is 20 feet wide at one end and 10 feet wide at the other. The length is 40 feet. The total area is 600 sq. ft. In other words, it covers roughly one-and-a-quarter cents of land. You’ll see a rock here but the rest of the area has been fully utilized. We have planted four saplings in each one sq. m. segment.
Many have doubts as to whether the plants will get enough sunlight and produce flowers. I’m sitting in front of the garden to show you it is possible. There are around 25 varieties, and you’ll see more than one plant of the each variety grown here – four dwarf white bauhinia, four or five hibiscus, more than one peacock flower and so on. If we were to count the plants that are in bloom, the number would come to 20 or 25, although it is not flowering season. Let’s check them out. This is a foreign variety, three or four of which can be found here. They bloom all through the year.
Look at this pink flower. That’s lantana, a wild plant. But now it has begun to shed its flowers. Next, you’ll see a violet flower known as borage. It used to be commonly found in our compounds. That is the pink coloured peacock flower. The other one is a foreign variety whose name I do not know. It comes in huge clusters. This is hibiscus. The other is dwarf white bauhinia. This is Florida fiddlewood. The flowers have fallen because of the rain. This is the commonest variety of hibiscus. This is a foreign flower plant which was included to attract butterflies. The next is jungle geranium. The other one has put out buds. When the flowers fall, the next one will put out buds. Here is another jungle geranium in bloom. This is crown flower that is white in colour. That is the changing rose. Today there is no flower on it but on most days, it blooms. But it has three or four buds about to open. This is another flowering creeper whose name I don’t know. This one is crape jasmine, the other is mussaenda. This is a foreign variety which flowers at night. They have begun to fall during daytime. This is another variety of crape jasmine. This is gardenia. Its flowering season is over. This is the golden trumpet, and this is periwinkle which comes in white and pink colours. This is the flower of the lipstick tree. This is scarlet bauhinia, a creeper that winds itself around every other plant. Look at the colour of its leaves. Maybe it is about to bud. This is a plant that is found everywhere in India. This is bandicoot berry which attracts a lot of butterflies and black flies and black beetles too. This is oleander. We had created the first Miyawaki forest on the other side of the road. We can see a few flowering trees of that forest from here. That is the burflower tree which does not have flowers now. The bauhunia is in full bloom. So there is no doubt that trees, even if they look lean, will flower.
All these were planted here in May 2019. So this is an 18-month-old garden. We haven’t done any maintenance on it, like regular watering or pruning. We merely planted them close to one another and watered them then. If we lopped off the branches, we left them at the base of the plant itself. That is all we have done. But they have grown well and that is why we show it to you. All of us have learnt theories that plants won’t grow, put out flowers or fruits if they don’t get sunlight. But here they manage with whatever sunlight they get. True, they would grow better if they got more sunlight. But they satisfy my desire to see greenery all around, flowers, plenty of butterflies and birds.
Sometime back, a bird made a nest inside this garden and its little ones have now flown away. We took pictures when the eggs hatched but later did not go there so as not to disturb them. During spring, that is April and May, there were a lot of butterflies here. So it is possible to have 150-200 plants in a one-and-a-half cent plot. We had planted 200 of which 130-140 remain standing. Certain other plants have also sprouted, possibly from seeds brought in by birds One criticism made against the Miyawaki forests is that all the plants and trees will be of the same age. But we see other plants sprout and grow too, like the gooseberry standing there and that custard apple. Maybe with the help of birds, soon we will see other plants also growing here.
What most people cannot fully comprehend is how plants can grow when they are clumped so close to one another. My reply is simply this: do it yourself and be convinced. But please follow the method laid down by Prof. Miyawaki. That is, prepare the seedbed, nurture the saplings before they are planted in the chosen plot, and plant them close to one another. This principle works in all walks of life.
Way back in 1995, Invis Multimedia, my company, was the first to import Apple machines in India for the purpose of video production. It was only later that companies in Mumbai started using Apple. Those were times when very few big companies, like Quantel and NDTV, used them. The first sale of Apple machines in India was in Kerala, in Thiruvananthapuram for Invis Multimedia. Not many were familiar with it then. So when a problem arose, the person who operated it said the machine was faulty. We told him that the machine was made for global use, and that the company could not afford to market a faulty product. So the problem lay with the user, not the machine.
The same applies to the Miyawaki Model. Prof. Miyawaki is a world renowned botanist. He came up with this model after nearly 40 years of research in Japan and Germany, and set up Miyawaki Model forests in 1300 places, planting 40 million trees all over the globe. His students have planted even more number of trees. All his observations and conclusions have been made public and he has written many books too. Therefore, if anyone thinks that his model is unworkable it is because they have not tried it out. Let us not conclude that something will not work even before we conduct an experiment. This video is to show you that his model is a viable one.
Meanwhile, doubts about the method of planting saplings continue to be raised. I shall show it for one last time. Here, I have drawn four one sq. m. segments. What most people do is to plant the saplings in the corners. That is wrong because if you follow that method, instead of having a total of 16 saplings, you end up having only nine. The correct way to do is to put the sapling of a tree right in the middle of the square segment. Then the other three saplings should be planted around it. We should do the same in the next segment. We have now covered two square segments and only one sapling remains for the rest of the land. Therefore, plant your saplings not in the corners but in the middle. Only then will we get to see the expected rate of growth.