Frangipani Fest

As landscape architects, we generally know how to design around plants and with plants. But to really understand the behaviour of plants and trees, we must know what a gardener knows. A good gardener feels the pulse of each plant. He knows how much to prune a plant and when. He intuitively waters the plants according to their needs through changing seasons. Basically, he can read the minds of plants! And that's exactly why, these days I am doing an internship with the gardener of my compound. And funnily, he doesn't even know that I am trying to be his student ;) But he's one happy chappy, ready to share a few gardening tips every now and then.

This morning, I saw him chopping off some branches of my favourite Frangipani tree. I ran outside a tad annoyed. But he told me that the increasing bunches of flowers this season have been weighing the tree down to one side. He needed to prune the branches on that side to keep the balance of the tree and stop it from bending down. I agreed, the tree needed pruning.

Immediately I began collecting the fallen branches that still carried loads of white and yellow flowers. He was saving them for me. These are the flowers I collect every morning.

He also warned me about the white sticky ‘milk’ that leaks from the chopped branches of a frangipani tree. I was actually aware of it. I have grown up around these trees in my childhood garden in India. We didn't exactly have this particular frangipani (plumeria obtusa) but we had the one with pink flowers(plumeria rubra) . My sisters and I used to have our hands smeared with that white sticky milk while playing “flower sellers”!

Soon I had several large bunches of long stemmed frangipani flowers, enough to decorate one tropical beach wedding party! Oh what a treat! I arranged the flowers in baskets on my terrace and made a few bridal bouquets as well. Oh I felt like a flower queen! It was indeed a frangipani festival marking the beginning of pleasant weather.