If Bengaluru is a city of gardens, Lalbagh and Cubbon Park are the two gardens that best exemplify it, often sitting solidly in the childhood memories of many city residents. One of the writers who has best revealed these gardens to the reading public is writer Suresh Jayaram.A native of the city with a background in the visual arts, Jayaram started out as a stringer for local publications such as the Bangalore Mirror, writing art reviews, and also taught art history at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath.Recalling the beginnings of his interest in the city’s great gardens, Jayaram said, ” I lived between Lalbagh and Cubbon Park and had done a lot of research about the city….With my own firsthand research and research from others, I put together some (guided) walks. In these early walks, I started looking at the city as the “kote” (fort), “kere” (lakes), “pete” (town) and “tota” (the gardens). These walks were conducted so that people could really engage with the cultural geography of the city….”Around 2010, he would also publish a monograph on Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, the German master gardener who had influenced gardens throughout Mysore State and across India. His volume on Lalbagh, Bangalore’s Lalbagh: A Chronicle of the Garden and the City, would follow years later in 2021.On his work on Lalbagh, Jayaram noted, ” If you look at the book, there is a lot of anecdotal information from the people who created Lalbagh, whether it was Krumbiegel, HC Javaraya or others, and also a lot of records, maps and botanical drawings that were available for research…..I was fortunate to have photographed the (British era) botanical drawings in Lalbagh as I was helping in the restoration.”He added, ” There were already existing books which the department had published….but it doesn’t read like a departmental book. It is more of a book which talks about my family history, connection with the city, looking at it as if you are taking a walk in the park.”Also Read | Writer’s Corner: Sugata Srinivasaraju on the origins of ‘The Conscience Network’ and how journalism has shaped his outputJayaram’s latest book, Cubbon Park: Citizens’ Perspectives and Many Visions for the Future, departs from the usual format by interviewing a host of people involved in various capacities with Cubbon Park – from Heritage Beku’s Priya Chetty Rajagopal, veteran retired IAS officer Chiranjiv Singh, to figures such as the late Vijay Thiruvady, one of the most knowledgeable figures when it came to Bengaluru’s green spaces.Story continues below this adHe said, “I wanted storytelling and conversation to be the source of the book….I chose 26 people whom I knew, to try and tell the story through the voices of people who have somehow had a role to play in the making of Cubbon Park or have engaged with it in different ways.”Jayaram added, I personally feel that it is very important that the park is almost synonymous with the character of Bangalore. It is very democratic and brings in people from different walks of life – it is almost like a microcosm of the city.”Having cultivated a reputation for writing about the city’s history, Jayaram is looking for a change of sorts, perhaps by way of taking a crack at fiction writing.