THE ROSE whisperer

Leaving the Indian Administrative Service and its accoutrements, all to move to a tiny hill station and grow roses might seem like madness but that’s exactly what M S ‘Viru’ Viraraghavan did, at 41, considered a prime age for a bureaucrat. But Viru had a wife who shared his enthusiasm, who joined hands with him when he took voluntary retirement in 1980. The couple shifted to Kodaikanal with their two children, and Viru dedicated the next 40 years of his life to growing and creating hybrid varieties of roses.

The couple were in Chennai recently for the launch of their book ‘Roses in the Fire of Spring’, in which they have documented their entire journey with the flower.

As a child, Viru had always been interested in plants, his father being the director of agriculture of the then Madras Presidency. He would stay with his father in department guest houses and it was one such stay at the Sim’s Park, Coonoor, which changed his destiny. The guest house overlooked a rose garden, which abounded with hybrid varieties created by a French hybridiser named Pernet-Ducher.

“He intercrossed standard varieties with the golden coloured roses from Persia, and the result was a sea of roses in spectacular shades. I was just a teen, but was fascinated. ‘If he can do it, why can’t I?’ stayed in my mind,” says Viru, now in his 80s.

As an IAS officer, he worked in different parts of the former Andhra Pradesh, where the climate was not suitable for roses, but grow roses he did, everywhere, besides taking them along wherever he was posted. “It was always a tug of war when we had to move between his roses and my furniture,” says his wife, Girija.

It was perhaps these challenges which set Viru researching on variants which can survive in warm weather. “Most rosarians grow roses imported from the West. The lifespan of these flowers are short and it’s a Herculean task to protect them from pests. The quest was to combine a variant which grows well in warm climates, with one which flowers repeatedly,” he says.

Eventually he found two species, one being Rosa clinophylla, which grows in streams in Bihar and Bengal. The other was Rosa gigantea, which grows only in the Northeast, for which the couple travelled to Manipur. After an arduous search, they finally found it and returned to Kodaikanal with cuttings and seeds. “The hybridisation can work only in a cold climate, which is why we have our base in Kodai,” says Girija. Rosa gigantea now adorns their Kodaikanal house.

By crossing these two wild roses with other varieties, Viru created more than 118 new roses with unique qualities, in various colours and forms. This includes shrubs, those with lush foliage, and climbers also. And he continues to create more. “Growing roses should be an easy and enjoyable process and we want more people to grow tropical variants, which are disease-free as well,” he says.

But the journey hasn’t been an easy one, and Viru and Girija have visited countless gardens and met rose experts across the world. “It takes about nine years to create a successful hybrid. Sometimes they just don’t work even if the parent species have all the desired qualities,” says Girija. Their roses are now being grown across the world, from South America to Europe.

They haven’t patented the hybrids as they feel it restricts their availability, and they want their roses to be grown everywhere. “Since we’re not commercial, we give a name to each rose and trademark it to protect our copyright. We see ourselves as rose missionaries, not salespeople.”

The new hybrids have thus been named after their friends, fellow rose explorers or the places they have visited — Sakura Sunset (after a visit to Japan) for example. One has been named after renowned botanist E K Janaki Ammal, and planted in all the institutions where she worked in India and the UK.

Ask Viru what he feels about his career trajectory as he looks back and he quotes a proverb considered to be by Prophet Mohammed: “If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a narcissus, for the bread nourishes the body but the narcissus nourishes the soul. I bought a rose, instead. It shifted the emphasis from the problems of everyday life to a higher consciousness.”