Discover Garden Climbers: A Pocket Guide
A new guide to help you identify garden climbers, creepers and vines
Land in many Indian cities today is a lot more about ‘prime real estate’ than ‘urban green space’. Still, we can all try our best with our own garden patches, can’t we? Yes, our first instincts tell us that to make a difference, we need to plant trees. But what if you don’t have any space to plant one? Few of us know that creepers, climbers and vines can also become an important mini-ecosystem of their own, attracting bees, butterflies and other insects.
Discover Garden Climbers: A Pocket Guide, a new publication that launches this Saturday in Bangalore, can help you learn how to make the most of vertical spaces in and around your home. While the creepers provide you much-needed visual relief from the concrete jungle all around us, they will also provide a home for biodiversity to thrive in the city.
It’s not just for enthusiastic gardeners, either. If you’re the sort that enjoys identifying the plants and trees around you when you go out to parks and public spaces, this pocket guide is a must-have. So the next time you stop to admire that star-shaped white creeper that smells like cinnamon and clove, just whip out your pocket guide and head to the white section. The high-resolution photographs taken by photographer Karthikeyan Srinivasan will ensure that you quickly whittle it down to the species you’re looking for (in this case, Apocynaceae or Malati - Clove Scented Echites). “The book is formatted in such a way that it’s easy to carry, and easy to use in the field. Rather than organising by species or location, the species [there are 65 listed] in this pocket guide are organised by the colour of the flower,” said author T. S. Srinivasa.
It has been published by EcoEdu, an environmental education startup which focuses on practical education in wildlife and field biology. According to Ulhas Anand, co-founder of EcoEdu, the hope is that they can kindle the curiosity of nature lovers. Srinivasa, Srinivasan and Anand have known each other for over 30 years now. A few years ago, they released the first book in this ‘Discover’ series – Discover Avenue Trees, with Srinivasan as the author. You can look forward to more such releases in the future, too. The next project that’s coming up is a pocket guide on Urban Spiders!
The book launch takes place at St. Joseph’s College in Bangalore on Saturday 6th January, 2018 at 4.30pm. More details here. RSVP to the event here or pre-order the book now! Rs 250.