ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, ‘Gardens’, brings out the advantages of greenery in the form of urban gardens. The purpose of raising gardens varied from case to case. Clean air and ‘pleasure’ had been the chief motives while botanical, medical, aromatic, decorative, and commercial purposes played their role. Botanists raised them for their research purposes while physicians grew mostly medicinal plants in their gardens. Some of them sold the plant products commercially. Grass was useful as fodder to their domestic animals and the surplus was sold away. Wood was sold in the market. Large logs were used in the making of furniture and instruments; the leftovers were burned into charcoal. Carts, agricultural tools, and other instruments and implements were made from wood in and around Madras. Low–grade wood also was used as firewood in households as well as in commercial establishments. Planned urban avenues with green gardens replaced the vacant and waste village lands. Gardens protected the city from sweltering heat. The government EIC garden was the oldest. The florae were largely diversified, ranging from the largest banyan tree to the most common flowery plants grown in pots. Many physician–botanists like Roxberg, Anderson, and Russell maintained large gardens for their botanical research. The EIC encouraged them chiefly on a commercial basis. Faunae too followed. The gardens were watered from rivers, canals, tanks, and wells. They were affected now and then by the coastal storms. All these urban developments had increased the land values. The main argument here is that though large–scale rural environmental degradation began in the early modern period with the advent of colonial exploitation of the natural resources, it was the opposite in cities where the Europeans lived and ruled from. Numerous gardens were raised by the EIC, and the vast greenery added beauty to the environmental grandeur of Madras. The newly planted gardens and garden houses had more than compensated the greenery lost by the shrinking agricultural fields and the surrounding scrub jungles.
