Jamshedpur: She not only has a green thumb, she has a creative mind that sees beautiful potential in items destined for the trash can.
Meet Sumita Nupur, 47, wife of Tata Steel senior executive Uttam Singh, who has created a beautiful garden at their Kaiser Bungalow company quarters on Kadma-Sonari Link Road, using things that are usually discarded.
Nupur uses everything from discarded bottles, broken ceramic slabs and containers, bath tubs, old kettles, iron kitchen racks, broken clay tiles, tyres, pedestal fans stands, bathroom showers, plastic vegetable crates and even an abandoned cycle.
On Sunday, Nupur, who applied as a contestant for Garden of the Year, a yearly event of Horticultural Society of Jamshedpur, had three visitors at home who raved about her talent.
Horticultural Society of Jamshedpur's external judges, Dhananjay Choubey and Debashish Pall from Calcutta and A.S. Sarangi from Rourkela, who personally examined her garden according to the rules of the contest, loved her ideas. Though winners of the contest will be announced later, a modest Nupur said the "kind words" of judges meant a lot to her.
Asked how she chanced upon using discarded items to beautify her garden, she said though gardening had been a decades-old passion, she could never find items to her taste to landscape it.
"Three years ago, I thought, let me prettify my garden using discarded things. And so, I started my journey. I didn't think I'd come so far," she smiled, adding she had no formal training in landscaping or gardening, but went with her logic and visual sense.
She grows everything, from flowers and vegetables to medicinal plants, bonsai and ferns, she added.
She uses discarded items innovatively, such as old kitchen utensils as containers for bonsai plants, a pedestal fan as a support for a creeper, pebbles collected from the banks of Subernarekha to line her garden, and so on.
Nupur has also displayed her creativity in growing roses using the soil-less style.
"Instead of soil, I used sand from the nearby river ghats in pots for roses. I supplemented sand with the compost I made at home. The results have very encouraging," Nupur added.
Not surprisingly, Nupur's husband and two children, Geetika Shilpi, 21, a management student in Bangalore, and Rohan Arya, 15, a Class X student of Loyola School, are her biggest fans.
Rohan told this correspondent that he initially didn't understand "what my mom was up to".
"But, then when our garden started looking amazing, I was thrilled. Now I help her. Didi (Geetika) tells me to WhatsApp pictures whenever mom does something new with her garden," he said.
Do you know anyone else who makes the best from waste?
Tell ttkhand@abpmail.com
