Curtain rises on Jeanneret Museum with nameplating of trees

After remaining shut for over nine months, the city museums have finally opened for the holed-up knowledge-seekers and curious minds of Chandigarh with Covid safety protocols in place. During the long closure, events and programmes marking landmark occasions that bond people with museums stood suspended, disrupting a crucial link. Pierre Jeanneret’s death anniversary on December 4 offers the perfect opportunity to rekindle the city’s connect with the unassuming, modest Frenchman who was Le Corbusier’s right hand man for the Chandigarh project; and to whom the city owes so many of its outstanding buildings—including the ethereal lotus-shaped Gandhi Bhawan on the Panjab University campus.

To commemorate the occasion, the architecture museums of Chandigarh in collaboration with the Chandigarh Tree Lovers (CTL) group is organising installation of information plates on trees and shrubs growing in the Jeanneret Museum, Sector 5. It was inaugurated on March 22, 2016, after painstaking restoration of the old house, where he lived for 11 years from 1954-65.

Much as the architecture of planning of the city is celebrated world over, its planned landscaping incorporating trees and vegetation is equally critical to its fame as a Garden City. To cherish and uphold this precious green heritage, it’s crucial to acquaint the ‘green fingers’ of the city and all nature lovers more intimately with the city’s trees and plants. Towards this cause, the city’s enthusiastic Chandigarh Tree Lovers group has been regularly conducting tree walks, lectures, student workshops, among others, to impart more knowledge regarding its green gold. Even during the Covid-imposed hibernation, it kept up the movement through online mediums.

In a similar exercise done earlier at the Le Corbusier Centre, the naming of trees and plants was taken up by CTL. The akin activity will be undertaken at the Jeanneret Museum on December 4 during the visit of UT adviser Manoj Parida to the campus. The CTL had earlier partnered with the municipal corporation, too, in installation of nameplates on tree avenues. It has plans to soon undertake a similar and larger exercise at the Government Museum & Art Gallery.

The Jeanneret house’s landscaping, in keeping with the vision of Dr M S Randhawa to have productive landscape along with ornamental in the city, has an interesting mix of fruit and flowering trees. Besides mango trees, other fruit-bearing trees growing in the museum are guava, chikku, bael. Flowering trees like bottle brush and champa are also visible. Two eye-catching ‘green skyscrapers’ of the landscape are the: Buddha’s coconut tree with its 50-60 feet height with huge evergreen leaves dotting its periphery and the other is ‘Christmas tree’ (auracaria cookii) jutting up along the backside of the house.

The cost of the nameplates is being borne entirely by CTL from its meagre resources as a voluntary group. Listing of all existing plants was done by its expert Dr Harjit Singh Dhillon beforehand. The nameplate design is in accordance with environmental norms.

Museums have grown beyond being mere repositories of old dusty documents, drawings and objects. Small details like tree nameplates draw attention of the visitors to the exemplary green heritage of Chandigarh that the ‘founding fathers’ like Pierre Jeanneret bestowed on us.

Rajnish Wattas is former principal of Chandigarh College of Architecture, a heritage expert and founder-member of CTL. Deepika Gandhi is director of Le Corbusier Centre and architectural museums