NCERT Solutions Poorvi Chapter 1 –26A Concrete Example (poem by Reginald Arkell) — Let us explore

Book page 25 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

I. Amrit Udyan is a garden spread over an expanse of 15 acres around Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. It has multiple attractions that include a specially curated garden for children called Bal Vatika, a treehouse, nature’s classroom, etc. It also has the Bonsai, Herbal-I, Herbal-II, Tactile Garden, Arogya Vanam, and Circular Gardens with a diverse variety of flora and fauna. Now, find out about popular gardens in your region and share with your classmates and teacher.

Answer

Method. Do not simply name gardens. For each one find out five things — where it is, who made it and when, its size, one feature that nothing else nearby has, and the best month to visit. Sources: your district tourism website, the municipal corporation’s parks page, and, best of all, an older person in your family who remembers what the place was like earlier.

Sample answer — a chart for a class in Bengaluru

Garden	Where	Begun by / when	What makes it special	Best time
Lalbagh Botanical Garden	South Bengaluru	Hyder Ali, 1760; extended by Tipu Sultan	The Glass House, and a rock said to be about 3,000 million years old	January and August flower shows
Cubbon Park	Central Bengaluru	Richard Sankey, 1870	Nearly 300 acres of old trees in the middle of the city; car-free on Sundays	Early mornings, any month
Bugle Rock Garden	Basavanagudi	laid out around an ancient granite outcrop	A garden built around stone — Mrs. Jones would approve	Evenings

Tip: Make the same chart for your own town, whatever its size. A village pond with a peepal platform is as much worth recording as a famous botanical garden, and nobody else will have written it down.

Q2.

II. A herbarium is a collection of plant samples preserved for long-term study, usually in the form of dried and pressed plants mounted on paper. Now, collect some fallen flowers and leaves from your neighbourhood. Place them in folds of a newspaper carefully and put a pile of books on them. After one week, take them out and use them to make a card, wall hanging or any other artwork. A sample has been given for your reference.

Answer

Method — how to press plants so they last.

Collect only what has already fallen. Do not pluck. Choose flat leaves and thin flowers; thick, fleshy ones rot instead of drying.
Dry the surface with a cloth. Any moisture left on the specimen will turn brown or grow mould.
Lay each specimen flat between folds of newspaper, well apart, with the underside of the leaf facing up so the veins show.
Weigh it down with a pile of heavy books and leave it in a dry place, away from the window.
Change the newspaper on day 2 and day 4. This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the colour survives.
After a week, lift each specimen with the tip of a knife, mount it on thick paper with two thin strips of gum, and label it — plant name, place, date collected.

Sample answer: I pressed a peepal leaf, a bougainvillea bract, a curry leaf spray and two gulmohar florets from my street. After a week I mounted them on a folded blue card, arranged as a small tree — the peepal leaf as the crown, the curry leaf spray as branches, and the gulmohar florets at the base. On the back I wrote each plant’s name, the road it came from and the date, so the card is also a record of one week in my neighbourhood.

Why the label matters more than the arrangement: A pressed plant without a name, place and date is decoration. With them it becomes a herbarium specimen — a record that a botanist a hundred years from now could still use to know what grew on your street in 20XX. Real herbaria, such as the one at the Botanical Survey of India in Kolkata, hold specimens collected over two centuries in exactly this way.

Q3.

III. Read and enjoy the poem. A Sea of Foliage A sea of foliage girds our garden round, But not a sea of dull unvaried green, Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen; The light-green graceful tamarinds abound Amid the mango clumps of green profound, And palms arise, like pillars gray, between; And o’er the quiet pools the seemuls lean, Red—red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound. But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes Into a cup of silver. One might swoon Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze On a primeval Eden, in amaze. — Toru Dutt

Answer

What the poem says. A dense mass of trees rings the poet’s garden like a sea — but not a dull, single green. Light-green tamarinds stand among deep-green mango clumps; grey palm trunks rise between them like pillars; and over the still pools lean the red flowers of the semal (silk-cotton) tree. Lovelier than any of it, though, are the bamboo groves to the east, when moonlight comes through the gaps and turns a white lotus into a silver cup. At such a moment one could faint with beauty, or simply go on looking at what seems like the first garden in the world.

Device	Line	How it works
metaphor	“A sea of foliage girds our garden round”	The leaves are not like a sea — they are called one. It gives the greenery depth, movement and the sense of stretching further than the eye can follow.
simile	“palms arise, like pillars gray”	Straight grey trunks become the columns of a temple, so the garden takes on the stillness of a sacred building.
simile (synaesthesia)	“Red—red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound”	A colour is described by a noise. This mixing of the senses is called synaesthesia, and it is the finest stroke in the poem — you can feel how suddenly that red interrupts the green.
metaphor	“the white lotus changes / Into a cup of silver”	Moonlight does not merely fall on the flower; the flower becomes another object altogether.
allusion	“a primeval Eden”	A reference to the first garden in the Bible — the poet is claiming her Bengal garden is as old and as unspoilt as the world’s beginning.

The form: fourteen lines — a sonnet. The first eight lines (the octave) rhyme round-green-seen-abound / profound-between-lean-sound, and they hold the daylight garden with all its colours. At line 9 the poem turns — “But nothing can be lovelier…” — and the last six lines (the sestet) move into moonlight and wonder. That hinge at line 9 is called the volta, or turn, and using it to move from day to night is exactly what the form is designed for.

Why this poem is placed here: Set it beside A Concrete Example and the two poems become a pair of opposites. Arkell is dry, rhymed in couplets, and finds a garden of stones absurd; Toru Dutt is rich, sonnet-formed, and finds her garden almost unbearably beautiful. Both are true responses to a garden. Which one you write depends entirely on how you look — which is the very point Arkell’s last line makes.

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