The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was recently voted the UK’s favourite garden and in July 2003 it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids.

Kew is  so obsessed with making the world smarter, wiser,  more generous towards the environment, that even its magnificent trees have turned into gardeners that compost, enrich and green the Kew soil for free. Kew lets nothing go to waste.

Its trees, plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables, all help by being shredded and used as compost. Every minute, Kew gets greener and greener and as you walk through its huge, sprawling grounds you too get greener, absorbing the small, big and bigger ways of gardening safely.

(Find out how much Bangalore’s gardens do for the soil. Do their caretakers use up the fallen leaves for compost? Or do they burn them wastefully? Ask these questions to the Horticulture Department. You might be surprised and saddened by the answers! )

The lucky 14 first-year students who are selected by Kew's School of Horticulture, don't sit yawning in the lecture rooms! In October they take charge of their very own vegetable plots! Each one gets around 30 square metres in size. The plots are  straggly with left overs from what the previous year's students had grown.

So the new ones start from scratch, clear out the old remnants and prepare the soil for crops! They get compost from the vast heaps  kept ready at this unique garden that always reuses, recycles and increases its garden wealth from the vast treasure house nature gives in abundance.

Students grow cabbage, radish, onion, lettuce, spinach, turnip, tomatoes etc. Each student designs his own garden and has a sowing calendar.

He can also use beautiful plants to decorate his garden - cosmos, chrysanthemums, peas and French marigolds! They have to choose plants wisely to ensure a totally chemical free garden, with no chemical fertilizers, no herbicides and no pesticides. They will find out that marigolds planted around vegetables, keep the pests under control.

Aloe Vera, nature's own medicinal plant is totally disease free and does not invite insects, like the lovely rose always does! Powdered aloes dusted on plants keep rabbits away from them! Aloe will cost us only Rs. 3 or Rs. 5 at the UAS, Horticultural and Herbal Plant: phone: 23330153 - ext. 338.

It is also smart to grow parsley near roses to keep away beetles. Marigolds and geraniums also shove pests away from roses. All this the students learn as they grow their own gardens.

Kew is the world's most enchanting  school that preserves the unrivalled collection of plants from every country, and even does research for finding newer drugs to treat malaria, cancer and even AIDS. Kew also seeks out and preserves long-forgotten herbal and home remedy treasures that are slowly vanishing around the world. It is  a garden that has sense and sensibility under its rose carpeting!

Kew’s Rose Pergola (below) is a living library of plants for students. In June it becomes a rose corridor scented and painted with every colour borrowed from the rainbow. Kew’s rose g arden was born in 1983 and has roses that are more than  a 100 years old.

Students have to get as much food as possible out of their plots and besides getting good marks for them, they also get to eat everything they raise! Students even get to sell their extra produce and whatever is left over goes back to be composted to produce mulch (fresh, healthy soil) for the next lot of students. All the allium family - that is, garlic, onions, chives (all available at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Horticulture division) are helpful to roses. In Bulgaria where roses are grown to use for making perfume, they are surrounded by garlic and onion plants to keep pests away. They also help roses to get a stronger perfume in larger quantities!