I am looking forward to increase the varieties of flowering plants in my Garden and as part of the hunt, I went to a new nursery in Anna Nagar, Chennai. Every nursery has its own, nice collection and this one too had a unique plant - the Origanum majorana. More commonly known as the Maruvu in Tamil( Names in other Indian Languages: Hindi:Marwa Bengali:Murru Kannada:Maruga Kumauni:Bantulsi Malayalam:Maruvamu Punjabi:Marwa Sanskrit:Maru Sindhi:Murwo, Maru Urdu:Marva khusa), this is an amazing herb/plant that has a beautiful, pleasant and mild aroma. The leaves are really small and the plant itself can go happily in a pot (though I have planted it on the ground to fill a void in one corner of the garden).
While the leaves are commonly used as offerings in prayer or strung together with other flowers like jasmine to make nice aromatic garlands that are offered to the divine, some research on the web shows that they are also dried and used as a spicy addition to food (but I doubt if this is done in India). The plant has settled comfortably and I am keenly looking forward to seeing the flowers spring up from it.
