By
Margaretta wa Gacheru
Step through
Ashwin Patel’s front gate and you arrive at a magical garden where literally
1000s of orchids and hundreds of bonsai trees are mostly in full bloom and on
display everywhere.
The orchids
are in and outside the five open-air ‘green houses’ that Ashwin’s constructed
over the last 30 years. And you’ll find the bonsai’s both on pedestals that he
and his assistant of 19 years, Peter Mutisya have built. Or they’re growing in
giant 20-liter buckets that Ashwin gets from his factory after all the glue
that came inside gets finished and he recycles them to grow his baby bonsai.
“We occasionally
sell the orchids, but not the bonsai’s,” says Ashwin who, with his electrical
engineering wife, Aruna, bought their land in Nyali 35 years ago. “It was cheap
back then, but now it’s not,” he adds.
“We built
this house ourselves,’ says Ashwin who is not a trained architect. But in the
same way he says he learned how to grow orchids—by trial and error – so he
learned how to construct their lovely home.
He also taught
himself to build the best ‘green houses’ for his orchids. “They need wind,
sunshine and lots of water. But the water must be misty and light, not heavy or
it can damage the plants,” he says, moving swiftly from his living room
outside, onto a veranda-like area that’s topped with beams covered in a
semi-transparent green mesh tarp.
“This is one
of my green houses,” he says, walking over to a switch attached to a brick
pillar that turns on the misty spray, the kind he explains he’s installed in
all five of his open-air [wall-less] green houses.
“Orchids
need plenty of water, so Peter switches on the mist at least twice a day. This
assures that our orchids will bloom and the blooms will stay fresh,” he says,
adding they also need insecticide and fertilizer to ensure they grow well.
His
insecticide is organic although I had never heard that hops [‘the leftovers’]
from homemade beer are poured out onto trays at the base of his orchids so the
snails and slugs (the most problematic pests) get attracted to the hops’
sweetness, drink it until they get ‘drunk’ and then they die.
“My son is a
mechanical engineer but he’s also a brew master who studied how to make his own
beer,” says Ashwin who also uses organic fertilizer. “We mix cut grass with the
waste from our septic tank. Then we let it dry a few days and put it on all our
flower beds and potted plants.
Ashwin says
he started growing orchids 12 years ago after he decided he didn’t want to give
his wife cut flowers anymore. Peter was already looking after his miniature
bonsai trees, many of which are over 40 years old. But then they began
experimenting with growing orchids so that today, he decorates his whole house
with them.
Indeed, just
as you step through his front gate and see green growing things everywhere magically
sprouting out of buckets, crawling up giant trees and planted in everything
from terracotta pots to gigantic seashells, so when you step into the foyer of
his lovely home, you are dazzled by the wide array of orchids looking fresh and
pretty in shades of pink and purple with yellow lips, ensconced on marble
shelves.
The first
ones I see are Oncidiums, which are a pastel yellow. Then come the Dendrobiums
which have the pink and purple blooms that Ashwin says last just 15 days.
Then in the front
hallway, I find lots of lovely Vandas, each of which has entangled roots
hanging down like a scraggly-haired little girl who needs a haircut.
“They can
last anywhere from three to four months in perfect bloom. They capture the
water they need from the air,” says Ashwin who insists they be taken outside
every four days to bask in the sun and get some fresh misty water.
Ashwin admits
he doesn’t know all the names of the trees in his garden, although as I point,
he easily informs me one is a rubber tree, another’s a guava, and another’s an
umbrella tree. He’s even got a Banyan or
Bodhi tree which he says is the kind the Buddha sat under for seven weeks until
he attained enlightenment.
What lights
up Ashwin’s life is his discovery of how to transform any tree, even the Bodhi,
into a baby Bonsai.
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