The Better India · 6 hours ago

Meet the Bengal Gardener Growing 400 Bougainvillaea Varieties, From Familiar Pink to Rare Gold

What a person chooses to love - and how deeply - can quietly shape the world around them. Chiranjit Maity, a 35-year-old nurseryman in Singur, West Bengal, tends over 400 varieties of Bougainvillaea across four bighas of land, and freely admits to being pagol - mad - about the plant he calls kagoz phool, or paper flower. When the pandemic stilled ordinary life, his Facebook page drew more than a hundred thousand growers and collectors from around the globe within a week, revealing how a shared obsession can become a kind of community. Across Bengal, the plant has gathered other kinds of meaning too: a retired zoologist replaced demanding orchids with it, a mother let her autistic son choose its colors for their terrace garden, and an independent breeder named his cultivars after Tagore, Gandhi, and a medical student killed by violence - each bloom a small act of cultural memory. That a thorned, drought-tolerant vine from South America could become, in Rabindranath Tagore's words, Bagan Vilas - ornament of the garden - and then travel from colonial import to rooftop solace to horticultural inheritance, says something quiet and true about how beauty finds its way into belonging.