Today is Valentine’s Day. Cupid must have sent my card to Bristol (something to look forward to), but I did get a bar of vegan chocolate later in the day. When I was planning our trip I was hoping to visit Amrit Udyan the garden of the Indian President. It’s only open a few weeks of the year – usually around this time – but the tickets didn’t become available for us to book until we got to India. I was pleased to book tickets for 10am today – plus they were free!

Reaching the garden turned into a bit of a saga. Google maps said it would take 35 minutes via the metro and a short walk. What Google maps hadn’t accounted for was the strict security surrounding the parliamentary complex. There were roads we couldn’t go along without a pass so were sent round another way. Just as we thought we were getting close the police block said we couldn’t get through and said we had to go all the way back round we’d come and further. Defeated (and now running late for our 10am slot) we grabbed a tuk tuk who dropped us right by the entrance – gate 35.

Getting through the security was also a faff. First they said Mike couldn’t take his ruck sack in so he had to go back to the cloak room. They said my small man bag was allowed so I went through the x Ray machine, metal detectors and frisking, only to get to the second security check to be told my bag had to go into the cloak room too, grr. This was starting to wind me up. Then we realised that we were not the only ones visiting the garden today. There were thousands – yes thousands of Indian school children all being marched in rows. I didn’t expect we’d have the garden to ourselves but this swarm of school children being frogmarched in a continuous line wasn’t really how I’d imagined us visiting the garden. 

we both wandered the ‘one-way’ route around the garden (if you don’t count the 10,000 school children who found us quite a curiosity). 

If you blocked out the snaking line of children, the garden was quite pleasant. The key feature was the hard landscaping of pools, canals and lotus flower fountains (that were working!). The sunken beds were similar to the other gardens we’d visited. An odd throwback to English gardens from the middle of the last century. Block planting of violas, pansies, sweet Williams, lillies, roses and tulips. The tulip were just at their prime and stood out. Planted in such order I suspect a ruler had been used to space the bulbs out.

From the so-called Mughal garden, we went along through the rose garden (more block planting of single rose varieties), until the route culminated in the sunken garden or butterfly garden. This was a masterpiece of block planting, and although not to my taste, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the blaze of colour. In the centre was a large pool and fountain topped it off.

We exited the garden and agreed that the walk to the India Gate would be too far, so decided to get a tuk tuk. The driver wanted 300 rupees but Mike masterfully bartered him down to 200 – which was handy as that was the lowest denomination note we had!