Parvin cherishes husband's memory thru' floriculture

Schoolteacher Khandakar Parvin Sultana of Tangail Sadar upazila spends much of the daytime looking after her flower gardens as she turned a floriculturist, cherishing the memory of her husband who left the world eight years ago.

Every day after getting up from bed early in the morning, she takes care of her flower plants.

After doing her teaching job for several hours at school, she goes to the garden again in the afternoon and does everything including collecting flowers, planting new saplings, watering the plants, weeding and spraying pesticides.

She has also employed three labourers to look after the gardens the rest of the day.

Now Parvin is cultivating gerbera flowers at her three gardens at Kandila village in Tangail Sadar upazila on commercial basis.

She has also around 150 orchid plants of different varieties at her house.

"My husband Mahbubur Rahman Khan Chhanu started flower gardening with roses on a piece of land on the house premises as a hobby in 1988. Within a few years, he extended the garden with 200 plants of different varieties of roses," said Parvin, 52.

"In 1997, Chhanu went to Madras in India for treatment. He brought some seedlings of gerbera from there and planted these in his garden. The beautiful flowers bloomed within a year.

"He produced more seedlings of the flower the next year. A vendor from Dhaka bought 300 gerbera flowers of his garden at Tk 5 each. Then Chhanu planned commercial cultivation of flowers and made shades with plastic sheets and bamboo.  

"He went to India again in 2004 and brought 500 seedlings of hybrid varieties of gerbera from there and extended his garden to 100 decimals of land.

"The profit from selling gerbera flowers and the seedlings helped smooth education of our two sons and a daughter. 

"My husband died of a cardiac arrest in 2009, and his gardens started decaying," said Parvin.

After overcoming the initial grief of losing her husband, she started looking after the gardens although she had hardly any knowledge about it at that time.

Within months, she gained sufficient knowledge about flower cultivation.

Parvin said she got around 3,000 flowers from her three gardens in a week during the gerbera season from January to March and sold it to flower vendors at Tk 3 to Tk 4 each.

Earlier gerbera prices were high but now it has fallen as the flower is cultivated in many areas of the country.    

“I cannot make much profit from flower gardening. But I feel glad to see blooming flowers which were so dear to my beloved husband,” said the schoolteacher.