Healing comes in many forms. And so do healers. But Myna Batavia stands out in that crowd. She heals plants.
Batavia, the proprietor of city-based outfit Green Carpet, runs the only plant clinic in Bangalore. While Green Carpet is her business enterprise, the plant clinic is a not-for-profit activity that Batavia runs from her premises. She started this clinic in 2005, with an aim to provide plant growers (with no detailed knowledge of plants) some help in tending to their greens. “Often people are given plants or they go and buy one that looks good to them. But they do not know what to do when the plant falls sick or needs a different kind of care,” she says. That’s where Batavia comes to help.
The plant clinic offers two kinds of service. The first one is healing, just as a regular clinic does. “Any owner can come with a sick plant. We take a look at it to decide whether it’s worth saving and if it is, we treat it and keep it with us till it is completely healthy,” she says. And then there is a sort of plant boarding facility too. People going on holidays or business trips can leave their plants with Batavia, where they are taken care of till the owners come back.
Incidentally, when Green Carpet became the sole distributors of self-watering planters that keep a plant watered for up to three months, a lot of individual plant owners walked up to buy these, instead of the corporate clientele that Batavia expected. And that put forth the idea of providing care for plants while owners may be away.
Batavia charges a nominal Rs50 or Rs100 at the plant clinic, though for diseased or pest-ridden plants she adds the costs of required medicines.
Green Carpet, however, is Batavia’s entrepreneurial venture. She had run a human resources consultancy firm for 13 years, before she tried her hand at Green Carpets in 2002, after her child was born. Batavia always had a love for plants and says, “I have a phenomenal green thumb. I’ve always grown plants and when I wanted work that I could do out of my home, something to do with plants seemed like a natural choice.”
Well, there has been no looking back since then. Today, Green Carpet caters to all kinds of gardening needs. So you get not only plants, but gardening tools, gardening accessories, garden furniture and furnishing, pots and planters, feeds and pesticides — name what you may. Of course, the top of the crop here are the Lechuza self-watering planters. Unbreakable, seepage-proof, fire-and frost-resistant, these planters come with a watering system that takes care of a plant’s watering needs for three months at least. Green Carpet offers landscaping and garden maintenance services, too.
Contact: Green Carpet, 627,17A Main, 6th Cross, 6th Block,
Koramangala; Phone: 080-25538651/25504550; Log on to: www.greencarpetgardencentre.com
