India Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well-known like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So, I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon,

a strange fantasy in the jungle,

as well as the private homes of great designers,

and the desert flowering in a garden...

and wherever I go I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens

on my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

This is my very first visit to India,

and I confess that it's daunted me more than anywhere else in the world.

I know that this is a country of fierce natural extremes,

with the weather alternating between drought and torrential monsoon rains.

However, I also know that this beautiful country holds a rich gardening tradition

and that's what I want to explore.

And through its gardens, hopefully, I'll be able to make sense of the country.

I begin my journey in the imperial state of Rajasthan and the gardens of India's imperial past.

Then, travelling south to Kerala, I find gardens founded upon the tea and spice trade.

Finally, I'll return north to Chandigarh,

and an extraordinary garden that was created in secret in the middle of the jungle.

Nowhere on this planet is more sensuous than India.

The colours, scents, sounds, food and sheer physicality,

create a vibrant turmoil that you simply can't avoid.

Clearly this is exhilarating, but it is also rather overwhelming,

and surrounded by this sensuous assault, it is hard to know where to begin.

So, I decide to start at India's most famous and most visited site.

But what many tourists don't realise when they make their pilgrimage is that, in fact, this is a garden.

So I begin my journey at dawn to visit the most iconic building on the planet.

Of course, the hardest thing on any really well known monument -

and there is no monument in the world better known than the Taj Mahal -

is to react trying to forget all the images you've seen.

Just as when you see

some extraordinary beauty...

..the reaction...

..is to still you.

It stops you in your tracks and there's not a lot to say.

All you can do is just experience it.

The Taj Mahal is the most spectacular example of a Mughal 'tomb garden'.

Mughal architecture and gardens were always inseparably entwined,

and the basic template for the gardens

was taken from the description in the Koran of heaven, which is depicted as a garden.

The Mughal garden was always divided into four quadrants with water an essential feature.

Each quadrant was subdivided again with raised pathways,

although these were remodelled as large lawns under the British-led restoration.

In the centre of the garden is a large marble tank from which run four broad canals

in which the ghostly reflection of the tomb is held and shimmers.

This was a garden intended, literally, as paradise on earth,

a living mirror of heaven.

The Taj Mahal is a monument to one of history's great love stories.

The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it as the final resting place of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

Its construction took 20,000 men 22 years to complete.

And every inch, every stone is a testament of love and sorrow.

The marble up here is blindingly white as the sun rises and it gets hotter.

It makes a stark contrast to the green of the garden and I'm sure that's deliberate.

You walk through this garden and arrive at this very austere, very pure place.

White, white marble.

Then, inside the tomb itself, it's very dark.

No photography allowed.

All you can do is go from this brilliant light into the gloom.

The famous gardens at the front of the main building are not original,

having been restored during the first quarter of the 20th century,

following centuries of gradual neglect.

But what lies beyond the tomb is far less known, and much more accurately preserved.

Across the river, ruins can be seen.

Over the centuries, a myth grew up

that Shah Jahan had intended to build himself a twin tomb there, but in black marble.

The Black Taj. The mirror image of his wife's in all but colour.

But I think the truth is actually much more interesting,

because the work done since the early '90s has proven that, in fact, this was not a tomb

but an extension of the garden of the Taj Mahal.

And down here, what you have is a vast tank,

which would have been full of water,

coming right in among these lotus leaf filigrees - imagine the water scalloped in there -

and a beautiful pavilion around it

from which people could view the mausoleum,

the white marble reflected in the water across the river.

Now, what that means is that

the Taj Mahal is the centre of the garden both figuratively and literally

with a beautiful and extraordinary grand garden in front of it and across the river behind it.

And through the archaeological work, they've managed to reconstruct the garden much more faithfully

than that which you see in front of the building or, in fact, any of the other Mogul gardens.

It's planted up really densely with trees and shrubs, with flowers and fruit,

all of which are designed to enrich the senses.

So, what you have is a paradise garden and that was deliberate.

That is what Shah Jahan intended for his bride to have around her as she lay dead.

Shah Jahan's reign was long and glorious but it ended as it began, with tragedy.

Not in his paradise garden, but a few miles down the river in the Red Fort of Agra.

Having created for posterity the heavenly beauty of the Taj Mahal,

it was here, in the old ruling palace of the Mughals' Indian empire,

with most of its magnificent buildings, still standing today,

that Shah Jahan ended his reign,

not on the throne,

but as a captive.

But for the last seven years of his life, he was kept a prisoner here by his own son.

And although it was a very grand prison - a gilded cage, if you like -

it did mean that this balcony behind me was the closest that he could get to the Taj Mahal.

So he'd come and gaze out down the river to where his dead wife lay.

Whilst undoubtedly the Taj Mahal is the great cultural icon of India,

and it's essential visiting,

it's actually only one part of its garden story.

About an hour down the road, at Sikandra, is Akbar's tomb.

And this, with it's garden, contains an element that even the Taj Mahal can't match.

It was built by Shah Jahan's grandfather, The Emperor Akbar,

who ruled from 1556 to 1605,

and in many ways it's the precursor of the Taj Mahal.

But what makes it extremely unusual is to this day,

it is still filled with extraordinary animals.

I came, of course, to see the animals, but what I hadn't expected was a sandstorm

which has really whipped up out of nowhere.

But it's not ideal because all the animals have run away.

I managed to grab my hat before it disappears.

The storm passes and the animals return.

There are langurs with their young lining up to be admired and fed.

And blackbuck testing out their fine corkscrew horns.

And there are peacocks too, out-dazzling everyone and everything.

The Mughals valued all aspects of nature

and the menagerie was seen as an integral part of a true paradise garden.

Hunting was one of the great Mughal pleasures

and so the animals also provided the emperors with sport.

But they were only part of any Mughal garden and never the main focus of interest.

Remember, the gardens were based upon the Islamic ideal of paradise.

Paradise was a place which, above all, had abundant water,

and so water was always a part of paradise gardens.

The whole Islamic Mughal garden mythology was centred around water.

A large tank of water was always central and also significant -

the bigger the tank the more important the garden -

so this is a real whopper of a tank in a very dry part of the country.

Then you have these rills which it overflowed into.

You can see how lovely it would be if that was water and catching the sunlight

this silver line going straight down to the doorway and then leading to the tomb.

It's really sad that it's empty and dry

and I can only suppose that water is in such shortage at this dry time of year

that it just can't be afforded.

The walkways are raised right above the garden

with what look to me like holders for torches so you could see it at night.

By looking down on it, you would see the flowers below you,

and across into what would have been trees with the animals amongst them.

It wasn't until the British came and cleared most of the trees,

to make it look like a Capability Brown park, that you had grassland.

The Mughals were empire builders,

successfully invading India from Afghanistan in 1526.

During the subsequent three centuries, they created a fantastically opulent dynasty.

What I find really staggering about this place, Akbar's Tomb,

and, of course, the Taj Mahal is that they are tombs.

They're not palaces and yet they are enormous, glorious places

and it makes you realise, apart from anything else, how rich they must have been.

Almost incomprehensible wealth.

During the 16th and 17th centuries,

Mughal society was at the height of its cultural and artistic sophistication.

Akbar's Tomb and the Taj Mahal were only two of the many magnificent gardens of that era.

While most now lie in ruins, all bear witness to that golden age of Mughal power.

Before the Mughals established their rule,

India was a series of individual, mainly Hindu, states,

each with its own ruler or Maharajah.

The Mughals were canny enough not to sweep away this existing culture,

but gave them wealth and power and let them keep their religion.

So, the Maharajahs continued to build and maintain their own palaces and gardens,

although, their gardens were not devoted to Allah, but to pleasure.

Thank you.

In my next garden, the principle pleasure is relief from the unbearable Rajasthan summer heat.

Built in the mid-18th century, the Monsoon Garden at Deeg was a large palace

with a whole range of gardens all devoted to cooling display and entertainment.

The Mughal gardens were based strictly upon order, restraint and harmony,

and although Deeg, made 100 years after the Taj Mahal, does show many Mughal influences,

it's frankly extravert, slightly kitsch and technically ingenious.

From up here on the roof, you can see clearly the layout of the Char Bagh,

or the Mogul, four quadrants of the garden.

The key difference is in the way that water is used,

because in Islamic and Mogul gardens, it tended to be tinkling and modest,

whereas here, it's festive, it's a socking great display,

and I think that's the key to the difference between the Moguls and the Maharajahs.

They did like to party and to party as extravagantly as possible.

The water needed for the fountains

and all the other extraordinary displays of water they used in the garden

all had to be brought up here

into this tank

which holds, apparently, 600,000 gallons -

every single drop of which had to be drawn up.

Before it was filled, all these holes around the outside -

there are hundreds of them - were stopped up with wooden bungs.

It would be filled up and would just sit there.

Then if wanted water to go to particular parts of the garden

or even particular fountains you pulled out the appropriate bung and down it went.

They could even change the colour of the fountains by adding dye to the water.

Now, this enormous quantity of water was drawn up

from a big deep well there

by a wheel into a huge leather bucket

that would just balance on the edge there

and that was drawn by ropes by a pair of oxen.

You can see that the ropes over the years have worn a groove in the stone.

The oxen would go down the hill drawing up the full leather bucket of water

and then come back up here and it was the job of one man

just to tip the water out onto this slope.

It ran down into this corner, underneath the walkway into the tank.

It took that team a whole month to fill it up.

To get the most from this garden it's important to imagine it as a place filled with water.

Instead of being a sort of monolithic stony lines,

these canals would be light and silvery, and reflecting the sky and the greenery.

There would be colour from the different fountains, colour from the reflections,

colour from the people in their gorgeous clothes walking around.

It would be a place of festival and entertainment and light,

and not this sort of semi-archaeological place,

which is fascinating but doesn't really do it justice at all.

This cage jutting out from the side of the building where everyone could see it was to house a tiger.

The ingenuity of the waterworks is extraordinary

and they culminate in one outrageous performance in this building.

This pavilion is the culmination of the Maharajah's extravagance.

I think it's the most opulent thing I've ever seen in a garden anywhere in the world.

It's the Monsoon Pavilion

and it was used to simulate and recreate the monsoon.

There was a wide canal surrounding the central area,

with large fountains that would flow.

The roof is a false roof and effectively it's a water tank

filled up from the basin across on the large roof.

When it was full, water would run down from small pipes on the inside

to create a curtain of rain.

So, the Maharajah and his friends and family could sit on the inside

and look through this wall of rain, just like the monsoon.

There were also, incredibly, metal balls inside the hollow columns

that banged together as the water flowed past them simulating thunder.

The whole thing, an orgy of water, noise and blessed coolness.

So, you had the rumble of thunder, the crashing of the water, the fragrance of the rain.

All that would last for an afternoon

and that piece of theatre would take the entire tank on the roof

that took a month to fill.

Now, I would go on into the central area but it's occupied by rhesus macaques,

who've made it very clear that it's their territory

and they certainly don't want me or anyone else on

and I'm advised they have a very nasty bite.

From the vantage point of the top tank, you can see that Deeg is set in a parched landscape,

so this extravagance of the water garden was a dramatic statement of the wealth and power of the owner.

The two huge lower tanks were a key part of the garden's water system,

but today it is being used only by local people to wash clothes and themselves.

The jubilant watery celebrations belong really to the past,

and for much of the time, the garden sits silent and dry.

But my next garden is a Maharajah's pleasure garden that is being brought expertly back to life.

So I make the journey four hours drive west of Deeg,

to Jaipur, the Red City and the capital of Rajasthan,

whose broad streets are four times as densely populated as London

and they throng with hectic life.

However much you prepare yourself for India and read about it,

nothing can really ready you for the sensual assault.

Everything you look at is an extraordinary picture,

the colours, the sounds, the scents, the tastes,

are so vivid that it is genuinely overwhelming.

You feel submerged from time to time.

And, it's all rather wonderful.

The garden I've come to see lies just outside the old city.

The water garden at Deeg is very beautiful but it is a ghost garden.

You feel that without the water and without lots of people, it doesn't truly come alive.

Well, this is a very different kettle of fish.

It's very alive but it's in a state of disrepair.

This is the Jal Mahal, and every year, after the monsoon rains have fallen,

this garden comes truly into its own.

Now in the middle of the dry season, it looks as though Jal Mahal

is set on the edge of a potential landfill site.

But actually it's positioned in the middle of a giant lake

and when the monsoons come, this will fill right up.

A vast wall barricades the valley,

creating a dam to hold the water that pours off the mountains

to form the lake which surrounds the building.

So this isn't a garden containing a water feature, but a water feature containing a garden!

In fact, there's so much water that,

at the peak of the floods,

the whole of the lower storey would be flooded

and you can see that the windows are staggered diagonally

to provide different landing stages for visitors,

as they came to the building.

But for the moment visitors are barred since the site is being restored.

Luckily, that doesn't include us.

This building may look from the outside like another wonderful palace

but, in fact, the whole thing exists to support a pleasure garden.

And when it came to pleasure, the Maharajahs bowed to no-one.

What style they had!

They created an artificial island, shaped it like a palace,

and then flooded an entire valley, simply to create a lovely garden.

And although it's fallen into disrepair,

the garden is being restored and reinvented

with the help of the American garden designer Mitch Crites.

What are you hoping to achieve here? What's the plan?

The first phase is to complete the garden

and we're calling it Chameli Bagh. Chameli means jasmine

and jasmine is a very beautiful, fragrant flower and scents the entire garden.

And then, inside the garden, we've taken a floral arabesque design which is a fusion

of all of those elements that have come from the past.

Hindu, Muslim, Mogul, Persian.

Jaipur probably, maybe only Florence,

and a few other cities in the world, have so many living arts and crafts.

These stone carvers, without any doubt their ancestors were employed

to create the original city of Jaipur in the 18th century.

And these skills have been passed on from generation to generation.

You're saying that the same families of craftsmen

are still working on this that worked on the original building.

No-one is in touch with second millennium BC roots, the way India is

and that makes India very special.

You've lived here for over 40 years,

tell me what it's like to experience the monsoon - I can hardly imagine.

Well, it's an extraordinary time.

This is April.

The heat hasn't even hit yet. Heat and dust hasn't even hit.

Soon it will become hotter - 47, 48, 49 degrees

and then the sky will turn yellow and the sun will turn lavender

and it becomes hotter and hotter and more humid

and you know the rain is up there but it doesn't come down.

And people who feel like clawing at the sky, to make it come down.

It's there but it doesn't fall.

When it falls, if anybody - children, adults - riding in a car,

you get out of the car and you stand in the rain, you just stand there.

Thank God, it's come, finally it's come.

It's a great, great relief.

The garden's empty because it's the middle of the day, and it is quite phenomenally hot.

Heroically hot.

Everybody other than the odd mad dog and one even madder Englishman,

is taking refuge from the sun.

But seeing it in its empty state, it reinforces the fact that this is the first of my gardens I've seen

in the process of being made and very early stages too.

And that's interesting and exciting because it brings home,

it brings to life the continuity that is expressed here.

The continuity of materials that come from the same quarries, of craftsmanship, even of craftsmen

because it was their ancestors that made the original building two and a half centuries ago

that were connected to the people that made the Taj Mahal, that go back thousands of years.

But while the Maharajas built their grand palaces for spectacular outward display,

there's another type of Hindu garden I very much want to see.

One created primarily to satisfy inner needs.

If you're not careful, it's easy to assume that a culture is best represented

by the gardens of the great and the good.

But it's not all maharajahs' palaces here in Rajasthan,

and true Hindu gardens can be found best in temples

and I'm now going to see a very modest temple with its own little courtyard garden.

My guide to the sacred plants of this Hindu Temple Garden is Saurab Sinclair.

-Shoes.

-Shoes off. Is that really important?

It is, it's to keep the purity of the space.

They haven't seen my feet!

That's part of your purity at the moment.

Now you say this is a typical Hindu garden.

That's correct. This is a temple garden really.

Everything here is because it's auspicious or it's worshipped.

You've got the jasmine,

the banana,

-people tree...

-Which is essential.

Which is essential.

The branches look more like the roots

and they believe that's how it connects the two worlds together, that it's upside down.

My feet are connecting rather painfully to the surface. It is so hot!

We should move to the temple.

That's really hot!

-It's a warm courtyard.

-Now this obviously is the temple itself.

This is the main temple.

There's a little Krishna temple around the corner but this is the main sanctity of the temple.

-HE SPEAKS HINDU

-What were you asking for there?

I was asking for the blessings, which would be the water with some basil in it.

So that you can be blessed.

Right, what do I have to do?

Big bit of basil there. It's all falling out.

-So just touch it to your lips and over your head.

-OK.

-That's it.

-Fully blessed!

I'll show you the plant, it's right here if you can brave the courtyard again.

It looks sort of a bit like marjoram, doesn't it?

But it's...

HE SNIFFS

Oh, gosh, it's much more pungent and intense.

They continuously pluck it to place into the water, to place on lunar eclipses in your food.

They use the seeds to give it to widows so that they keep their chaste.

-Quells their lust.

-Quells their lust.

The design of this little garden isn't important. That's not the point.

The plants are being grown as material for fragrant offerings,

or for their religious symbolism.

This small temple garden

is actually closest to the pure Hindu idea of a garden that there is.

But the Moguls were very wise when they let Hinduism exist,

and places like this could continue as they always have done for centuries,

and the Maharajahs didn't reject all the Mogul influences.

They absorbed them and made something of their own and again there was a coexistence.

If there is such a thing as a typical truly Indian garden, then I suppose that this is it.

And it's interesting that the most humble and practical of gardens is still in constant use

while those of the rich and powerful eventually fall away.

And the main reason for this is that here, in the bone dry north of India, water is so precious

that you need incredible wealth just to maintain a garden.

When the money dried up, so did the gardens.

But down south, in the lush hills of Kerala,

the climate is so perfect for plants, almost all plants,

that money practically grows on trees.

For over 1,000 years, traders have made fortunes in the port of Kochin.

And the town is deliciously infused with the smell of the commodity that lured them here.

The warm, exotic scents of spice.

The influence of a succession of spice merchants from around the world

can still be seen in the old Dutch streets, the 16th-century Portuguese church,

and, most dramatically, in the beautiful Chinese fishing nets.

Spices have drawn people here from the other side of the world for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The Chinese were the first to come here.

Then the Portuguese came at the end of the 15th century,

then the Dutch took over at the end of the 17th century

and finally the British took possession at the beginning of the 19th century.

So there's been wave upon wave of colonisation,

based entirely upon the spice trade.

Given its geographical position,

the coast of southern India is a natural staging post for trade between the West and the Far East.

But what makes it ideal for the spice trade

are the perfect growing conditions in the lush green hills inland.

Hot, wet and steamy and yet, critically, cooled by cloud,

the mountain jungles are rich with treasure growing on the hillsides.

These forests are the indigenous habitat of some of the most valuable plants in the world.

So, appropriately enough, my next visit is to a spice garden.

Part small-holding, part permaculture

and part botanical garden, Mr Abraham's plot defies categorisation.

But one thing is instantly apparent - it is expertly tended,

with some of the world's most sought-after plants growing happily here in his tame piece of jungle.

The star of the garden is a plant native to Kerala,

which finds its way on to practically every dining table in the world.

-You can see the pepper here.

-Ah-ha.

See the pepper growing, see.

So it grows as a little bundle of seeds?

Actually when the flower comes,

it is white in colour and when the rainwater oozes from the top to the bottom the pollination happens.

-So it's pollinated by rainwater?

-Yeah, no honeybees, no wind.

It is through the rainwater the pollination happens.

If no rain, no fruit grows...

And you see when they ripe they become red colour, you see the red colour here...

And if you peel the skin off and dry that, it's white pepper.

See the green and red? Dry in the sun - within one day both these will change to black colour.

-Which do you prefer?

-You want to taste one pepper?

Lets try that one.

White one - the most strong one.

OK, see if I can take it, if I'm man enough.

Do you have a bottle of water with you?

No. It is strong!

It's nice, its good, it's not nasty is it. It's just hot.

It's hot and high flavour

-and you know it is the best pepper in the world.

-Really?

Yes, pepper originated in Kerala.

-And it did come from here?

-Yeah.

-I tell you what, I can hardly speak!

-HE LAUGHS

The pepper's just hit me. I haven't got any water, but I will survive.

'He did warn me!

'Then Mr Abraham led me to a stand of another very valuable, native Kerala spice.'

-Ah, this is cardamom, the queen of spice.

-The queen...

You know, that's the fruit.

See here, see the fruit grows in...

we call it the panicle, it comes just at the bottom of the plant.

This is the plant, actually.

It grows up in the shade, under the trees, bigger trees only.

Do you want to taste some fresh cardamom?

Do you know, I honestly don't know what cardamom tastes like,

but it is a really important spice, isn't it?

-It is the taste of India.

-I've got to taste it, haven't I?

It is used in tea, coffee, in, um, sweet preparation, meat preparation, and in many medicine it is used.

It is very good for blood circulation, like ginger.

It's very seductive.

'Mr Abraham and his family have been growing spices on this plot entirely organically, for three generations.

'It is fascinating to see something that you hardly think of

'as a plant at all growing in its natural home.'

That is coffee.

Yes, I thought I recognised that. I've never seen coffee in flower.

This is coffee arabica.

-It's lovely. Like jasmine.

-Smells like jasmine.

-What's this in the corner here?

-That is turmeric,

and it is the root of the turmeric that is the real spice.

-This is the root.

-Pinch it and see the colour.

-Can I break this?

The fresh one is mostly used for medicines,

against snake bites, spider bites and so on...

It kills all the poisons.

In India you have the relationship between health and food

sorted out and its very sophisticated and very successful...

In the West, we don't do this and it's clumsy.

-You can start.

-You're dead right, we can start and we should start.

'I think that one of the best ways to understand the past is to smell

'and taste it, and seeing these spices grow underlined the extraordinary historical wealth

'to be had from India, based upon plants that could be easily grown and then traded at vast profit.

'The tropical mountain climate is not just ideal for growing spices,

'but also another plant, introduced by the British from China,

'and which provides the raw ingredient for the one thing I always miss most on my travels -

'a nice cup of tea.

'The British originally introduced tea growing to India

'in the early 19th century when tea was moving from the preserve

'of refined society to ordinary working people.'

'This was encouraged mainly because it was an alternative to alcohol,

'but also because it needed boiling, so the water was purified,

'making it a safe as well as a temperate drink.

'I hadn't expected tea to make such a bewitching scene.'

'Walking through it is like wading through a vast, bristly green sculpture.'

The tea crop makes for the most beautiful landscape

because the bushes are organised in a series of crazed patterns,

like drying mud,

and that mixture of uniformity

and rhythmic but irregular change,

is just like a lot of modern topiary.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say, this is as beautiful

as many a garden. They're called tea gardens.

It raises that perennial question, when is a garden not a garden?

I think in a place like this that question becomes irrelevant,

the whole thing just evaporates

into one beautiful, man-made arrangement of plants.

'All tea is produced from the leaves of camellias.

'In fact, the vast majority

'of all tea comes from one particular species,

'which is camellia sinensis, the Chinese camellia.'

It's just these tender leaves that are picked

and it's that that produces your morning cuppa.

'These perfectly manicured hillsides are a combination

'of natural and man-made beauty,

'although I suspect that the women working in them might see them in a less ecstatic way.

'They are maintained to look like this only as a result of their constant labour,

'with much of the crop still harvested entirely by hand.

'They are called tea gardens, but I am not going to count them

'as one of my 80 gardens, although it was fascinating to see them.

'However, the tea company here does maintain a real garden

'at its head office, and that is where I am going now.'

'The Railway Garden is built around a de-commissioned railway station in the hill town of Munnar.

'But crikey! It is rum do.

'It's just like stepping into a hand-tinted postcard of a 1930's British garden.'

This is a very strange place.

I'm not sure I know what to make of this at all.

So you've got hydrangeas, just like my grandfather used to grow.

And snapdragons, Salvias, Alstroemerias -

all the ingredients of an English garden,

but it doesn't look like any kind of English garden that I've seen for, what...

30, 40 years?

'This garden looks like a pre-war time warp.

'But, astonishingly, it was created as recently as 1980.'

These rows of salvias

and white alyssum, now white alyssum takes me back. When I was a child,

the bedding by the front door, year in, year out, was white alyssum and pelargonium,

but what's curious is that anybody over 50 coming from England would recognise

lots of elements of this garden with a sort of dreamy nostalgia.

But anybody under 35 or 40

would recognise practically nothing here.

It would be completely surreal.

When would this tea have been picked?

-Yesterday.

-Really?

-Yes.

We've got...

a yearly flower show that we have and it's organised by the YWCA,

that's the Young Women's Christian Association.

and, er, every year the garden comes first.

It's got so many flowers around, it makes you feel good.

I like the entire garden, it's beautiful.

Is it deliberately evoking British connections?

This garden has a lot of British touch in it.

But I think if you go elsewhere you may not find a garden as beautiful as this.

In general, do people like those British connections,

or is it something that is done for historical reasons or because they like the result?

I think they do like the British association.

They've left behind a lot of cultures which we still do follow.

'This garden is a relic from colonial days, although in fact

'the Raj was already a distant memory when it was created.

'But in its own dotty way, I think it is completely charming.'

You know what it's like, it's like, um...

ladies sitting by the sea,

in a row,

quite comfortable with their lives but looking back over it,

rather than looking forward.

'For all the eccentric Englishness of the garden,

'as I leave I am confronted with a reminder that I'm actually a long way from home!'

We are walking down here because there is an elephant on the back of a lorry there.

I don't know what it is doing or where it is going, but I have never seen an elephant like that before.

What a beautiful, beautiful animal.

Last night one of the production team was woken up by a terrible crashing in the night

and couldn't imagine what it was, and went out and it was an elephant tearing up the garden in the hotel.

Seeing that makes you realise that we are in another country here.

OK, this is not something I thought I would never say -

follow that elephant!

I'm now going back north to visit a much more potent symbol

of British influence on India - the capital city of New Delhi.

'New Delhi was designed by the British as a statement

'of power and order, established with massive confidence in stone,

'parks and grand vistas.

'It is landscape architecture on a breathtaking scale.'

I've seen pictures of this, or photographs...

but actually in the flesh it's much more impressive, the whole scale is much bigger than I'd imagined.

'In 1912, the building of New Delhi began.

'It was to be a city suited to the grandeur of its status

'as India's new capital, and this enormous project was given

'to a relatively young and unknown English architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens.'

Now, the extraordinary thing about Lutyens is that although he was a wonderful architect

and designer, actually, I know him best as a garden designer,

because he and Gertrude Jekyll did a whole series of gardens at the beginning of the 20th century,

which you can still visit.

So, for me, this take me from the highways and byways of England

to the Imperial Capital of the British Raj.

An interesting little detail I've just noticed is that on the metalwork of the gates,

you have the Tudor rose of England alternating with the lotus,

the symbol of Hindu India.

'Lutyens was an extraordinary man, able to work in an astonishing range of forms,

'drawing inspiration wherever he found it.'

'Here in New Delhi, I believe that he struck exactly the right note,

'mixing imperial pomp with its Mughal and Hindu heritage.'

The thing I find really extraordinary is that Lutyens,

who was capable of designing exquisite relatively small gardens and light fittings

and kitchen surfaces, could simultaneously be designing this vast imperial city.

'Lutyens incorporated parks, avenues and trees into his design

'for New Delhi, not only making it a beautiful green city, but also a cooler one,

'providing shade and lowering the temperature of the centre by several degrees.

'I think New Delhi is a masterpiece and despite being created as a statement of Imperial power,

'it is an honourable inheritance from the British Raj.'

'The irony of new Delhi is that by the time it was completed

'in the early thirties, it was almost redundant.'

Within 10, 15 years, the British Empire in India was over

and it became just another piece of its past,

like the Red Fort behind me built by Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal.

That is a symbol of the lost Mogul Empire, and through the gardens,

I've just seen the way that cultures come and go

and they adopt and absorb each other and that's how they survive.

It's like the streets, where different colours and creeds

and religions all mingle in this chaos, but somehow seem to be remarkably tolerant.

But, before I leave India and before I finish this journey,

I'd love to see a modern garden and to see where India possibly is going to.

'And so, I'm making one final journey,

'catching the 8.30 express from Delhi heading north to Chandigarh,

'in the foothills of the Himalayas.'

'I'm off to visit a garden famous not just for its completely

'unique beauty, but also for the incredible story of its creation.

'This is 25 acres of labyrinthine, sculpted gardens.

'It is a bizarre and magical vision of modern India.'

'The Rock Garden of Chandigarh is the creation of a single man,

'who started building it in the 50s in a clearing in the jungle,

'using just stones and waste material, without telling a soul.'

This is all the waste, they look like broken loos, actually, and basins as much as anything.

See, that's from a urinal, says he, touching it!

These are old insulators, aren't they?

They're beautiful.

And, presumably, these are water pots.

'Created on land its maker didn't even own,

'for years it was undiscovered, a totally secret fantasy.

'But in 1971 it was finally stumbled upon and very nearly bulldozed.

'But, to their eternal credit, the local authorities realised that it was a work of genius

'and not only decided to keep it but gave its maker, Nek Chand, now an old man, their full support.'

Why in this place?

Why here?

I knew this place no building will be erected at any time.

This is open space.

And why did you do it? What made you do this?

Because whenever I saw the material lying on the ground,

on the roadside, behind the hotels and restaurants,

I used to collect these things on my bicycle.

-So you gathered all the materials on your bicycle?

-Yes.

That must have been quite a job.

It was hard work, my job was also hard work

and this...to bring the stones from the hills,

it is also a very difficult job.

And you have people, I imagine, from all over the world coming here.

Did you ever imagine that would be the case when you were quietly making this garden?

Never, I never imagined it.

What a life!

It is a god gift.

'I bet people thought, "Oh, there's that mad bloke again, riding around collecting all his rubbish,"'

and they didn't know that secretly

he was creating this stony jewel

in the middle of the jungle. I mean, how romantic is that?

That's the best garden story in the history of the world.

'The visitor to this garden enters into a private fantasy world, linked by narrow passageways

'and deep gorges, twisting through its maze-like structure.'

Look at that.

Look at that, look at that!

'Everything is strange. Everything is a delight.

Everywhere you look, there is something extraordinary and something that assaults you

and challenges preconceptions

and that is what this garden is doing,

every little twist and turn, you think, "Wow, what's going on there?"

I love it, I love it, I love it.

You see this type of thing is really good, broken...I don't know what, stone bosses, all different sizes,

put irregularly on a path. Now, all conventional logic

says either space them evenly, or put them to one side,

but I like the fact that you have got to negotiate your way and pay attention!

Whoa!

My theory is that gardening is grown-ups going outside to play,

and if you garden in the same spirit as you went out when you were a child, on a lovely summer's day

and made camps and played cowboys and Indians or whatever

and ran around, and then came in all hungry and had your tea,

then A) you'll enjoy gardening more, and B) the gardens will be better.

And this exemplifies that.

See, look at that man there holding his cup.

And others holding old cups... And he's made out of cups.

And here we seem to have most of Indian wildlife.

We've got macaques, and we've got leopards or tigers.

And poor old skinny elephants,

it's really good fun.

Can you think of a better way of recycling

than making it into beautiful art?

It should be compulsory - do something beautiful with your rubbish.

I've just been overwhelmed and delighted by this garden,

I've just loved it and it seems to me a perfect modern image

that represents India and humanity beautifully

and it's one of the most pleasurable gardens

I've ever visited, and I think one of the great gardens of the world.

'I said, at the beginning of this journey, that I was a bit daunted.

'The extremes of India seem so shocking,

'and its life force so fierce that I wondered how I would cope.

'But I have been completely seduced by the place.

'Through its gardens, I have had an intoxicating taste

'of its plants, people, history and landscape.

'From the paradise gardens of the Mughal emperors,

'to private pieces of tame jungle and the patterned landscapes of the tea gardens,

'India is the most life enhancing place that I have ever visited.'

And to finish in this garden,

which is modern,

based entirely on humanity, on one man's vision

and yet visited and shared literally by millions every year,

seems to me a great symbol for modern India.

And I leave not remotely daunted, but full of hope.

Next time, my travels will take me to the continent

with the most diverse climate, plant life and landscapes on the planet.

A land almost twice the size of Europe - South America.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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