Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary

Botanic Garden Day Visits

The garden is open to the public Monday to Saturday from 8 am to 4 pm. Nearly 3000 people visit each year, many of them are local rural folk. Our garden tours include an introduction to the native flora and fauna of the Western Ghats and discussion about the importance of tropical forest bio-diversity, sustainable development, and habitat restoration. We also conduct specialist tours on request, including organic forest farming and wildlife gardening. Tours are offered in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, and English.

School in the Forest Residential Programs

Caring for the natural world and finding our place in it requires us to open our senses, enter natural spaces and to be where the wild things are. Our residential programmes for schoolchildren are aimed at addressing the increasing alienation of people from nature take and. This is accomplished primarily through an experiential approach to natural history: the cultivation of sensory skills in intensive ‘immersion’ programs in which contact with the forest is core.

Landscapes & Lifeskills Course

The aim of this five-month course is to help young people-discover their connection with the living world, while acquiring the knowledge and skills to understand nature and act sensibly with it. It is built on a series of interlocking units about the processes, organisms and influences within a landscape, including the relationships between people and their environments. The course is facilitated by the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary and Himal Prakriti (Munsiari, Himalaya). In their different places, climates and cultures, both parties’ central concern is the complex web of connections between individuals, their communities and their landscapes. Learning is primarily experiential: classes are conducted in the field via a series of questions and exercises.

The course is intended for young persons interested in the natural world. It requires an open spirit, a capacity for self-inquiry, a willingness to be challenged physically, psychologically, and intellectually, an ability to cooperate with a diverse group of people, the stamina to live for long periods in simple conditions, and fluency in English.

Dates: December 2006 – April 2007. Cost Rs. 50,000 for 5 months includes accommodation, food, instruction, and travel. Scholarships are available. Please inquire if you are in need of scholarship.

For details, click here.

Courses for Teachers & Adults

This December we will offer a week-long demonstration of our ‘forest-pedagogy’ approach. Adults interested in experiencing the rainforest through observation, awareness, and natural history are welcome to join. Special sessions will be held for teachers who wish to integrate these methods into their classroom.

For details, click here.

Vocational Training

GBS has trained around 30 gardener-assistants over the past 25 years, all of them local women (unheard of in India, where gardeners are male). The bulk of our extensive, carefully detailed conservation work is conducted by our ‘ecosystem gardeners’, whose manual skills and ability to design and execute experiments have been critical to establishing our gene pool. Oddly, gardeners (maalis) have no visible place in the array of recent conservation strategies. Yet they are indispensable in the global plant conservation cause. Unless we can increase the pool of skilled conservation gardeners, habitat restoration efforts will not succeed.

For this reason we have launched a vocational programme to train rural women from outside our district as Conservation Gardeners. The Conservation Gardener training includes instruction and practice in the cultivation of endangered plants. Trainees are provided with meals, lodging, and a stipend. English language classes are available. Graduates of the one-year course will be expected to continue in fully-paid work at GBS for at least one more year. After this, they may stay on or return to their own communities to support projects in land care or afforestation. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please pass on this information to them:

Eco-System Gardener Training

The Programme consists of an introduction to taxonomy (names and classifications of plants), plant biology, organic horticulture, and biodiversity conservation.

Requirements for Admission: Candidates should be female, understand enough English or Malayalam to receive instructions, and offer a minimum 2-year commitment. Working at GBS requires an open mind, the ability to work co-operatively with a diverse group of people, and to be comfortable living in rural conditions.