Seema Sud

Dr Seema Sud (born 1940 ): Gardening – A Lifelong Journey

It is a given that everyone in the gardening world of Delhi NCR, nay India, knows the name Seema Sud. Popular with fellow gardeners, her passion and pastime for gardening translated into it being a part of the fabric of her life.

Seema Sud was brought up in an environment close to nature, gardens and birds, and her love for gardening was a natural corollary of this. Sports – Badminton, Table Tennis and Volleyball – competed with gardening as a passion. After graduating in botany, she got married at the young age of twenty-one. She devoted about a decade to raising her daughter and son and only picked up the threads of gardening once the family   moved to Calcutta.  Here she joined the Bonsai Club and other gardening groups. Besides looking after her personal garden, she soon started actively helping friends with landscaping and gardening.

The turning point in her gardening journey came when she moved to Delhi/ Gurgaon and joined the AIKGA and the Bonsai Group and took courses in Ikebana, growing fruit trees, and vegetables.

When Seema Sud relocated from a bungalow type house with a front and back garden, into a flat type accommodation, many thought her passion for gardening would take a back seat. However, within no time she took charge of the landscaping and gardening of the condominium to which she had moved in. Her organic gardening skills transformed the common areas into beautiful welcoming spaces. Her knowledge about the soft science of gardening made sure that whatever she planted was seasonal, local and healthy. She developed an organic vegetable garden; turned a wasteland into a flat garden; used discarded pavers for the division and path for maalis.

Seema ji recognised and promoted naturopathy’s power to heal and cure. She has been a respected naturopath , explaining how juices of vegetables, taken in balance and in season, could help in maintaining our bodies and ward of diseases.Fragrance, for her, is one of the essential senses out of five senses that makes a complete garden, the others being sight, touch, taste and hearing. A garden without fragrance is like a body without its soul. She believes that every garden should have fragrant creepers, climbers, trees and shrubs.
Besides being an avid gardener and   a naturopath, Seema ji has also been a  yoga enthusiast. She not only made yoga a way of life, but also helped many people in doing so. Besides all this, she has many other interests and achievements – teaching meditation, diet consultancy, and cooking . She has  over 50 TV shows to her credit. She was one of the convenors in the Gurgaon chapter of AIKGA for 25 years and a regular prize winner in AIKGA annual shows. She was invited as a judge and speaker in Delhi-NCR by garden groups and regularly contributed articles in several magazines. Her condominium ( Belmonte at Golf Course Road) won the first prize as the best institutional garden and several other prizes, in its maiden entry in the annual AIKGA show.

However, none of the other interests matched her abiding love for nature and gardening, which sustains her in her twilight years in Antara, Dehradun. Seema ji truly believes the outdoors are essential to our happiness, health and well being and that all people need access to nature and the outdoors, close to their homes.

Beyond and above everything, Seema ji is, and will always be,  a gardener. Her love of plants and nature has impacted many minds and lives. We at IHS will always be grateful to her for nurturing  us, mentoring us and guiding us.