Gardens

Bhutan is one of the few countries where a door to a garden can be as interesting as the garden. That’s not to say that Bhutan does not have nice gardens; quite the opposite. In Paro and Thimphu we passed lots of cottages and houses with wonderful little gardens, some of them with such a profusion of flowers that they drew little gasps from The Family. But you must admit that if I use the adjective awesome for the ceremonial door to a public garden that you see in the featured photo, I would not be exaggerating. Fortunately ordinary people could pass through a simple gate to one side.

I thought it would be nice to pair the photo of a pink hybrid rose from someone’s lovingly tended garden with one of its wild ancestors from the Himalayas. There is a common belief that the route to modern roses came through hybridisations first carried out in central Asia. There are records of roses from China’s Han dynasty in the 2nd century BCE. The first of these modern roses was carried from China to Europe in 1789 by Gilbert Slater. The centre of diversity of the family Rosaceae is in Asia, although there are native roses in Africa, Europe, and north America.

Hydrangeas are another diverse family from Asia and Americas, with the greatest diversity in east Asia. I knew that they are indicators of soil acidity, with colours changing from blues to reds as the pH of the soil changes. But the yellow blooms that The Family noticed were new to me. What does it mean for the soil when they grow right next to a pale blue inflorescence? In contrast to this, the clover, genus Trifolium, that I captured is an interloper. The genus is originally from Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Himalayan wild strawberries, Fragaria nubicola, were growing in the same field.