Taera Chowna & Kerman Madon
Born into a family of gardeners and botanists, landscape architect Taera Chowna’s passion for gardens began from a young age. She has been working since 1988, and is a well-kept yet legendary secret behind some of the most beautiful gardens in private homes in Mumbai and Alibag, working with architects like Nozer Wadia and Bijoy Jain. “I always want to tread as lightly as possible on a site, managing land in a sustainable way,” says Chowna. Her daughter, Kerman, joined her in 2014 and their emphasis is on planting indigenous species, reinstating natural habitats, and reintroducing native fauna—bees in particular— to the property. “They are the ones who will eventually sustain the land.” The mother-daughter duo recently worked on the landscaping of Good Earth founder Anita Lal’s Sitara property in the foothills of the Himalayas.
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Varna Shashidhar
While she was always passionate about nature, it took an internship with Sri Lankan architect Chelvadurai Anjalendran for Shashidhar to realize the symbiosis between built form and landscape. After a masters at Harvard University, she set up her own practice, VSLA, in 2013, focusing on creating contextual environments that celebrate a nuanced natural beauty. “Cultural landscapes in India have the power to touch the chitta (human consciousness), which transcends the sensorial. That is a quality I aspire to add to my work,” she says. Among her achievements are an ecosystem for Neev Academy in 2015 and a one-acre urban remediation landscape for the Bangalore International Centre in 2019. She is currently working on creating a healing landscape in Katthiwada, Madhya Pradesh.
—Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
Pradip Krishen
A self-taught landscape designer, Krishen carries out long forays and rigorously documents the plants he encounters—their preferred soils, phenology and ecological niches. It is rumoured that he doesn’t make any drawings; instead, his designs are carried out directly on site, placing plants while visualizing them like a cinematographer framing a shot for dramatic effect. Just like the chasmophytes he plants, Krishen thrives when between a rock and a hard place. He ecologically restored a swathe of rocky desert below the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur to create the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park, followed by the Kishan Bagh Sand Dune Park in Jaipur. In addition to his gardens and field work, Krishen’s books Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide and Jungle Trees of Central India have inspired many to the wonders of the natural world.
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—Fazal Rashid
Hemali Samant
While studying landscape architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, Samant’s sketches resembled still- life drawings: a building encircled by trees and plants. “I was fascinated by the association between space and nature,” she recalls. Two pivotal experiences—with Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai and English landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith—shaped her practice. “Both opened my eyes to how, inside and outside, people, land and surroundings can become one.” She established her studio in 2014 and has since collaborated with local farmers to design an ecosystem full of native species for Avasara Academy in Pune; created a tropical forest for Natural Ice Creams in Juhu, Mumbai; and undertaken landscaping for Surat’s Greenlab Diamonds, among various residential and industrial gardens.
—Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
Vivek Gour Broome
A Pune-based field botanist who specializes in native trees, herbs, grasses, bamboos, medicinal plants, reptiles, and amphibians, Gour Broome lives on a farm that resembles a forest, home to over 530 species of native plants. His focus is promoting biodiversity through forest surveys and plant observations. “Some plants only grow on rocks; you’ll never get them to grow in soil. These are little learnings that can lead to amazing results,” he reflects. Letting nature take its course, he only intervenes to remove non-native species. His expertise is highly valued by landscape designers, who seek him out to help recreate evergreen or deciduous ecosystems in private gardens or industrial sites. “My dream is for people to leave room for nature. Natural vegetation looks after itself. It’s about finding beauty,” he says.
—Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
Nazneen Jehangir
Known for her prowess with cut flowers, Jehangir has been running the Mumbai-based luxury floral boutique Libellule for close to 15 years. Her arrangements have a still-life quality—sculptural with an amorphous symmetry, working with negative space and an alternative idea of beauty. Her journey in landscape design has been relatively recent, with her first major garden at an Alibag home by AD100 firm Case Design. Her style is decidedly Mediterranean—native palms with informal clumps of flowers or grasses peppered with fruiting shrubs. Her childhood memories include “summers spent under trees, various scents of crushed foliage wafting through the air— the romanticism, however clinched, was forever burned in my memory”. She adds, “I think on some level I’m just trying to recreate that magic.”
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—Gayatri Rangachari Shah
Bagirath Prakash & Jonas Suchanek
“In India, arboriculture is still developing,” says Suchanek, who cofounded the Auroville-based Tree Care in 2018 along with Prakash. “Maintaining trees isn’t just hacking branches with a machete; it requires an understanding of tree biology.” Their method challenges traditional landscaping. They assess the land, map trees, and assign retention priorities based on species, age, health and other factors. They then create arboricultural reports that architects can overlay onto their designs. From serving 1,000 households in Auroville to consulting for embassies in New Delhi and Chennai, offering tree inventories for Goa’s Panaji Smart City programme, and working with corporates like TVS and Reliance, Prakash and Suchanek have a far-reaching mission.
—Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
Adrienne Thadani
—Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar
NOTE – This article was originally published in architecturaldigest and can be viewed here
