Who moved our horticulture?

It was 1856, a year before the Indian mutiny. India’s new Governor General Lord Canning had just moved to Calcutta with his wife, Lady Charlotte Canning. The couple had sailed from England a year earlier in December 1855, and before coming to the colonial headquarters in Calcutta, they had a brief stay at a villa called Government House, in Parel.

Lady Charlotte was an accomplished botanist and artist, and before coming to India, she had been a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria. From her new home, Lady Charlotte sent the Queen and the children regular letters that were replete with illustrations of things she saw in India.

“To the royal children she sent a steady stream of natural history specimens, while the Queen enamored of India and Indians (but too fearful of snakes and insects to travel hither), pressed Lady Charlotte for details of life around her,” writes Eugenia W Herbert in her book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens of India.

Herbert, Professor Emeritus of History at Mount Holyoke College in USA and author of several books, says much has been written about architecture and imperialism, but little about gardens and imperialism. “The present work is intended as a first step in telling the story of the gardens Britons created, or attempted to create, for themselves in India,” she writes.

“When Britons arrived in India in the opening years of the seventeenth century, they found the sub-continent awash with flowers. But the flowers were different, their wanton abundance unsettling. Absent were cowslips and daisies of British meadows and hillsides, in their place were strange exotics such as jasmine and lotus,” she explains. 

When Lady Charlotte moved to Governor’s House in Barrackpore, Calcutta, she found the garden and villa shabby. She took it upon herself to fix the place up and one of the places that she used as a model is the Bombay Presidency governor's residence in Parel.

The Parel villa was home to Lord Elphinstone and the ''beauty of the tropical vegetation" had charmed Lady Charlotte. Once a Jesuit seminary, when the Portuguese handed Bombay over to the English (as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry), the building was converted into a villa.

Adapted to the local tropical climate, every room had a verandah. From her window at Parel, Charlotte could, as she wrote in one of her letters to Queen Victoria, see ''groves and groves of cocoa and palm overtopping round headed trees, then burnt-up ground, mango trees in flower exactly like Spanish chestnuts, tamarinds, peepal trees, higher good deal than the rest with trembling leaves-very green and pinkish stems, a teak tree with a lot of berries." 

The Parel villa survives today as does the abundance of variety of flora mentioned by Lady Charlotte. It continued as the governor's residence till the mid-1880s, when the governor's villa -- now known as Raj Bhavan -- was shifted to Malabar Hill. In 1885, King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, visited India and stayed in the Parel villa for a week.  Two years later, during the bubonic plague, the building was converted into a plague research lab in 1898 and in 1899, the premises were handed over to Dr Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine, a Ukrainian bacteriologist and student of the great Louis Pasteur, who was appointed Director in Chief of the laboratory . In 1906, the villa was formally renamed Bombay Bacteriology Lab and in 1925, it would be rechristened Haffkine Institute, which is how it's known today. 

At present, the institute stands on 29 acres and has 832 trees of 168 species and two types of lawns. The villa Lady Charlotte had so admired is now the main office building, where Prof Dr Abhay Chaudhary, the director of the institute sits.

“The book has made an important discovery,” says Prof Dr Chaudhary on the fact that these gardens were replicated in Kolkata by Lady Charlotte. “We have maintained the lawn and have a large variety of plants, some of them a century old. Of the 168 species, 37 species of medicinal plants have anti-dote value and used for research. Besides this there are 28 environmentally important species and 81 ornamental species,” he told DNA.

Few of the medics and students who study and live here are probably aware of the floral legacy of the institute.

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