Following my recent shift to Chandigarh, I found myself captivated by the city’s exquisitely landscaped front yards—a grandeur reflected in the meticulously curated foliage of its residential lawns. The city’s annual “Best Lawn” competition underscores this collective commitment to greenery and beautification.
Nestled near the hills and blessed with favorable soil and climate, Chandigarh’s gardens flourish with a diverse variety of flora. These green spaces evoke a sense of land art, natural installations where personal creativity and environmental harmony intersect. The practice of cultivating these gardens feels like a quiet yet profound form of art—an intimate, individual expression of aesthetics and care.
Inspired by the beauty of these landscapes, I began documenting their intricate details through scanning varied parts of plants, capturing textures, forms, and patterns to create a personal archive. This effort seeks to digitize and preserve fleeting, perishable fragments of nature that belong to this region. The scanned images, with their organic intricacy, transform into motifs in their own right and become foundational elements for a larger composition I’ve titled My Pleasure Garden.
This work symbolically reflects India’s deep-rooted cultural affinity for adornment, presenting nature as both an aesthetic and conceptual framework. My Pleasure Garden encapsulates the essence of a culture that celebrates its environment as an extension of identity, inviting contemplation on how natural spaces shape our collective sense of belonging.