Desert bloom

The formidable beauty of Mehrangarh Fort is now familiar to millions around the world thanks to its role in the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. It has towered over the Indian city of Jodhpur for 500 years, inspiring the atmosphere of the city - at least that is how it has seemed.

Walking through a new garden at the fort, the first in India devoted to indigenous desert plants, makes you think again, and realise it's the landscape that has dictated the character of this mighty citadel. Here, the land is brown, arid and rocky, but in the short winters and rainy seasons, even the most brittle, thorny plants manage to muscle up to produce flowers of incredible delicacy and colour.

Seeing a desert flower, just two slim purple petals and a needle-thin stamen, in this harsh terrain only amplifies its ethereal quality. But for the team who created the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park, which opened in February, the process was far from unearthly.

It took project director and park curator Pradip Krishen, his stoneworkers and planters six years to transform the unruly ravine and hilltop within the grounds of the fort into the 70-hectare desert garden. Krishen planted only flora native to the rocky parts of the Thar Desert, which covers much of west Rajasthan state. Learning to grow them took years of trial and error, detailed records and a great deal of patience.

Clearing the land on which the garden now sits involved a whole new set of problems. It was covered with an invasive species that is almost impossible to eradicate, Prosopis juliflora, known as baavlia, "the crazy one", in the local dialect of Marwari.

Baavlia seems to require no water or nutrients and it secretes toxic alkaloids around its roots to discourage anything else from growing nearby. It is madly successful. Even the story of its arrival here from Central America sounds crazy. It was introduced to huge swathes of land around Jodhpur in the 1930s by the maharaja, who went up in his aeroplane and scattered seeds out the window. No one knows why for sure, but there is some suggestion the maharaja thought the plant could be used to produce aircraft wheels, many of which would be needed as a world war approached.