Dr Romualdo M Del Rosario: Builder of Beautiful Gardens

"The Garden is a microcosm of the Lost Paradise here on earth." AVR 

By Dr Abe V Rotor

Living with Nature School on Blog

Dr Romualdo R del Rosario left, the country's leading builder of gardens pose with the author, his former student and co-professor at the UST Graduate School. Among Dr Del Rosario's obra maestra  are the internationally known La Union Botanical Garden (Cadaclan, San Fernando,La Union), the UST Botanical Garden (formerly Pharmacy garden), and the De La Salle University garden at Dasmariñas, Cavite. As a scientist and former assistant director of the National Museum he is keen at giving importance to natural history, and aesthetic and functional beauty of parks and gardens as integral part of homes, establishment, offices, in fact, whole communities.   

Think of a living gene bank. 

No, it's not the IRRI's germplasm bank of rice varieties and cultivars.  Or CIMMYT 's similar bank for wheat and corn where seeds are kept under strict controlled conditions away from the natural environment. It's not the commercial plant collection of Manila Seedling Bank either.

Dr Romualdo del Rosario's concept is one that is natural -  plants of different species living together and arranged into a garden.  

Here the plants form a wide range of diversity, and with other organisms, from protist to vertebrate, form a community.  And through time, an ecosystem - a microcosm of a forest, grassland, desert, the upland and lowland, in varying combinations and designs. This garden is indeed a living gene bank.

Visit the La Union Botanical Garden perched on a gentle hillside covering several hectares, with the fringe of Cordillera on the east and a panoramic view of the San Fernando Bay on the west. 

Here you will find a piece of the biblical Garden, where Nature and man in cooperation and harmony try to restore the beautiful scenarios of that garden imagined in the writings of Milton and Emerson, in the paintings of Rousseau and our own Amorsolo, and the scientific pursuits of Darwin and Linnaeus.

As trail blazer, Doc Del as he is fondly called, pioneered with the support of the local government to set up a garden not so many people appreciate.  I am a witness to its tedious step-by-step development until after ten years or so, the garden became a center for field lectures, thesis, hiking, or simply a place of solace and peace.  To the creative, arts; the religious, reflection.  

The garden is an answer to our dwindling bio-diversity. It is a sanctuary where man's respect for Creation, in Dr Albert Schweitzer's term "reverence for life," becomes the neo-gospel of prayer and faith. 

The garden is a workshop with the Creator.  It is one roof that shelters the threatened and endangered. It is a sanctuary for recovery before setting foot outside again.

Here is the living quarter of organisms, countless of them, that miss the eye, yet are discreet vital links to our existence and the biological order. 

A single acacia tree as shown In this painting is a whole world of millions of organisms - from the Rhizobium bacrteria that live on its roots to birds nesting on its branch. And beetles under the bark, goats feeding on ripe pods, people resting in its shade or promenading.  

On-the-spot painting at the La Union Botanical Garden (AVR) 

These make but one small spot in the garden that speaks of the philosophy of  naturalism of Schweitzer, EO Wilson, Attenborough, Tabbada, Cabigan, and the late botanist Co. One aspect of the garden opens to the scholar an adventure of a lifetime: Edwin Tadiosa's research of mushrooms earned for him a doctoral degree. 

One consideration a garden is a living gene bank is its ethnicity. Doc Del is the leading authority on ethnobotany of the country today. It is a less familiar field although it is among the earliest, tracing back to Aristotle's Natural History as the guiding force in keeping the integrity of Nature-Man relationship, even to the present time.   

Ethnobotany is the mother of pharmacology. Medicinal plants are part of Doc Del's formula of a garden. Not that familiarity is his aim, but accessibility - that by being familiar with a particular plant, one can have access to it wherever it may be found growing. Any place then is a potential source of home remedy of common ailments.  

Go to the garden and you will find lagundi, sambong, bayabas, makahiya, okra, pitogo, takip-kuhol, oregano, and 101 other medicinal plants, domesticated or wild. It is nature's pharmacy house. 

It is E Quisumbing's source of materials for his Medicinal Plants of the Philippines. the rich three-volume Useful Plants of the Philipines by WH Brown. It is this field that Dr Juan M Flavier as senator sponsored a law in promoting Alternative Medicine which now benefits millions of Filipinos particularly at the grassroots.       

Go to the garden and you will find flowering and ornamental plants that constitute the main attraction of any garden. Here botany is transformed into the science of flowers, the secret of green thumb, colors and fragrance speak more than words, silence rides on butterflies fluttering, and music is hummed by bees, and fiddled by crickets and cicada.     

Go to the garden and relive life on the countryside. The song Bahay Kubo enumerates some two dozen vegetables, and speaks of simple, happy and healthy lifestyle.
A residence without a garden is akin to city living condition. With almost fifty percent of the population ensconced in big towns and cities. we can only imagine how much they have lost such a pleasant niche.    

Go to the garden with magnifying glass, not with the aim of Sherlock Holmes but with the clinical eye of Leeuwenhoek, father of microscopy. Start with the moss, the lowly earliest plant occupying the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder. They are living fossils in austere existence on rocks and trunks of tree. Doc Del wrote a whole chapter about the Byrophytes - the moss and its relatives in the Flora and Fauna of the Philippine book series.     

Have you seen a field of moss under the lens? It's a setting of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids movie. See the movie if you haven't.  Everything is so big you are a pygmy in the like of Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag, a sequel to Gulliver in the Land of  Lilliput. Imagine yourself either in one of Jonathan Swift's novels. 

You may wonder why primitive plants are so small, you may miss them in the garden. If you were on top of Mt Pulog second highest mountain in the Philippines after Mt Apo where Doc Del, my classmates and I, climbed in the late eighties, you'll be amazed at the giant bryophytes forming beards of gnarled trees and curtains hanging on rocks, and spongy layers cushioning your steps.  

Thus, the garden is a representation of much bigger models.  The Sequoia or Redwoods of California for example cannot be duplicated anywhere, but at the UST botanical garden where Doc Del served as supervising scientist and curator, you will find yourself dwarfed by the towering dita (Alstonia scholaris) the same way you would feel under the redwoods, or the emergent trees on Mt Makiling.  

Go to a garden and feel you are part of creation in Eden's finest time. The garden has a humbling effect, it has the touch of TLC -  tender, loving care, it is the womb of Mother Nature, its nursery, in her own life cycle in which each and every thing, living or non-living, undergoes a continuous and unending series of birth and death - and perhaps even re-encarnation.  ~    
            

  

Fern Garden, a specialized section of the UST Botanical garden. 

 Weird trees at UST: Acacia strangled by balete; bare deciduous trees with the main building as backdrop. 

 Outdoor life of students among camphor trees, UST. 

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 "These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs."

―Anton Chekhov, "A Day in the Country"

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On-the-spot painting at the UST Botanical garden by the author, with the tallest tree Alstonia scholaris,  locally known as dita. as principal subject.

Morning at the UST Botanical Garden
-      An On-the-Spot Painting
                   Dr Abe V Rotor 
It is misty, it is foggy, here at the garden,
     or it must be smog in the city air;
and the early rays pierce through like spears,
     yet this is the best place for a lair.

But the artist must be provoked, challenged;
     for peace can't make a masterpiece;
only a troubled soul do rise where others fall,
     where ease and good life often miss.

This lair is where the action is, the battlefield,
     where pure and polluted air meet,
where a garden in a concrete jungle reigns,
     where nature's trail ends in a street.

Art, where is art, when the message is unclear,
     colors, colors, what color is blind faith?
what color is rage, what color is change?
     colors be humble - black is your fate. ~

       

A spray of red and pink in the tree top,

either it is autumn's onset,

or the season had just passed us in slumber,

yet too early to hibernate

Catch the sun, borrow its colors and shine

that you may be filled with grace divine;

for your life is short and your flowers ephemeral,

that makes you a mythical vine.

There is no such thing as emptiness, for  memories linger;
the bench is warm, whispers hang in the glen;
spirits roam, the past comes around in them to haunt,
to scare a bit to remember them, now and then. 

 

 Golden Coconut 

 

 Lobster's claws, ornamental asparagus 

Golden shower

Here lies the Pierian spring  - the secret of long, healthy and happy life. Why don't you build a garden yourself? Better still with your family or community.