I’m sure some of you are thinking of me as ‘Queen of the Hills’, that perhaps I’ve acquired some sari fabric and have hi-jacked a bus so that I can sit on the roof, with a long length of fabric flowing behind me as we drive through tea plantations much like Pricilla Queen of the Desert. Sadly, nothing quite so glamorous or camp. Queen of the Hills refers to Ooty, allegedly referring to it as the finest of the British ‘hill stations’. Sadly the days of Ooty as a rather stately and dignified place have passed. If Ooty is a Queen today, it’s more of a tired drag queen, with perhaps a bit too much makeup on. The mass commercialisation of the centre of Ooty means that it’s actually pretty tawdry. 

Thankfully – after a tip off from Bharath and Shubhi we avoided booking accommodation in Ooty and instead opted for a small hotel perched high up just outside Wellington. It is a spectacular location – the views are stunning and the air is clear. It’s only a short drive (around 30 minutes) into Ooty so we were able to visit the Botanical Gardens there today.

In the UK,and many other countries, a botanical garden is a place where plants are preserved (often from extinction in the wild) and horticultural research is carried out. Here they seem to be more like public parks and very English ones at that. You could have picked up Ooty Botanical Garden and dropped it down in an English seaside resort like Eastbourne or Bournemouth and nobody would bat an eyelid.

The botanical gardens in Ooty were full of lots of features you might find in British parks. A glasshouse – here filled with lots of common garden flowers you’d see in the UK, Busy Lizzie, Pelargoniums, Impatience and Salvias. There was lots of clipped hedging (mostly Lelandi) and neat flower beds. A conservatory for succulents (currently closed for refurbished), a fern house (also closed), ponds, an Italianate terrace (again think seaside bedding) and a bandstand. There was also a lot of green lawn of course. The whole garden must take an enormous amount of watering to keep it looking so green. Also lots of labour – but that’s very cheap here.

The plants around the garden were very familiar, in fact I have many in my own garden. There were hydrangeas, ferns, Arum Lilly (Zantedeschia), fuchsias, and lots and lots of bedding. You got a real sense that when the garden was created in the 1840s they were creating a little bit of England in India to remind them of home. They certainly achieved that.