- Iconic Trees of India is a delightful book that delves into the beauty and historical significance of 75 trees.
- Covering folklore, ecology and historical uses, the book contains a myriad of stories, from the banyan with the world’s largest canopy, to a much-grafted mango, and a Giant Sequoia in Kashmir, the country’s loneliest tree.
- The book is a must-have for quizzers and those interested in India’s heritage trees waiting to be discovered and documented for posterity.
S. Natesh’s book, Iconic Trees of India, is a highly readable book that introduces you to 75 special trees, spectacular in size, girth, beauty, ecological importance, and graceful aging. He graphically details not just the majesty and beauty of the trees but also their cultural and historical significance, folklore, and the myriad stories woven around them.
Like the Taj Mahal or the Qutub Minar, which showcase India’s architectural heritage, these trees are a testament to the country’s unique ecological lineage. Yet, they have not received the same importance or attention as the monuments. This makes the well-organised book by a botanist, who taught at Delhi University for a decade and worked with the central government’s Department of Biotechnology, invaluable. He has spent a decade travelling across the length and breadth of the country to research and document these living monuments or ‘talismans of nature’. Adding to the book’s allure are the excellent watercolour illustrations by Sagar Bhowmick.
“The seasons come and go, rivers rise in floods, epidemics wipe out entire settlements and time passes by but trees generate more life and maintain immortality across multiple human generations. Their long life allows humans to imagine them as witnesses to ancestral events,” Natesh points out.
He recounts the story of King Marthanda Varma (1706-1758) of Travancore, who, with the help of a goatherd, hid in the hollow trunk of an ancient jackfruit tree to evade enemies pursuing him. The King survived, believing Lord Krishna had come to his rescue, built a temple near the tree, and worshipped the God and the tree. The tree bore abundant fruits till the 1970s. Now, its trunk is preserved in a temple near Thiruvananthapuram.
Special trees are regarded as abodes of Gods and spirits and worthy of worship, but Natesh laments that these aspects of trees are forgotten when designing conservation policies. The Botanic Gardens Conservation International, U.K., linking botanical gardens of the world for plant conservation, has said 30% or 17,510 tree species of a total of 60,000 are at risk of being wiped out. This is more than twice the number of threatened mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles. The loss of large old trees is a cause for concern in many ecosystems worldwide. The population of these trees is declining very fast in landscapes with extensive grazing, and they may disappear in the next 100 years.
Living legends
The book details the iconic trees in four sections in North, East, South, and West India. Among the world’s seven tallest and largest living trees listed in the book is Thimmamma marrimanu, or Thimmamma’s giant banyan tree, found in Gootibylu near Kadiri in the Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. It has the world’s largest canopy and covers 19,107 sq.m. (over four acres). The size of 2.7 football fields, it was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest in the world in 1989.
Thimmamma is said to have lived in the first half of the 14th century and committed sati on her husband’s funeral pyre. One of the banyan poles of the pyre started sprouting leaves and buds and grew into a splendid banyan tree. Since then, Thimmamma has been revered as a goddess, and a shrine has been built for her under the tree.
The tree that hosts millions of bees is also a banyan tree of Ramagovindapura, in Hoskote tehsil of Bengaluru rural district of Karnataka. The girth of the tree is over 24 metres. The ‘bee tree’ has 630 honeycombs of the Asiatic giant honey bee, setting a record for the highest concentration of nesting bees. Since 1998, the number of honeycombs on the tree has increased. The number of hives does not remain constant. The majority of bees start arriving by October and the population grows till January. The honey is generally harvested in March and the bees disperse in April. At the height of the season, the tree plays host to between 43 million and 62 million honeybees. Till the extraction of honey was prohibited in 2009, villagers of Ramagovindapura were earning Rs. 30,100 each season by regularly harvesting the honey. The agricultural output of farms in the vicinity of the tree is excellent, and the credit for this is given to the pollination by the bees. The local village residents get five harvests per year as against the normal four. Though there are other large trees in and around Ramgovindpura colonised by the bees, their favourite continues to be the massive ‘bee tree’.
Karnataka and Jammu and Kashmir have the largest number of iconic trees, 13 and seven, respectively. Kashmir is associated with the stately chinar. The oldest and the largest of them, known as Qasim Shah’s chinar, stands in the village of Chattergam, Chadoora tehsil of Badgam district. It is believed to have been planted next to a small mosque by the Sufi reformer Qasim in 1374. Its huge trunk has a girth of 15 metres, equivalent to the circumference of the Qutub Minar’s base. One of the tree’s six main branches was cut off to avoid damage to an adjacent madrassa. The five other branches have a massive crown home to hundreds of noisy birds.
All the Mughal emperors, especially Jahangir and Shah Jahan, loved the chinar and used it as an element of Mughal garden architecture. The Akbarnama of Abul Fazl records the presence of a chinar tree so large that it could accommodate 34 soldiers in its trunk.
Stories both majestic and macabre
The author also writes about the “loneliest tree in India”, a giant sequoia (Cypress family) close to the Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine, Yarikha, Tanmarg, Kulgam district, J&K. The giant sequoia (noted by IUCN as the most endangered tree) is the largest, single stemmed tree on earth and is found at a height of 1,220 to 2,440 metres on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges of California. India’s lonely sequoia could be 85 to 90 years old. The tree was discovered in 1975 by D.L. Dhar, a University of Kashmir botanist, while on a survey expedition. It was then 22 metres tall and had a girth of 2.8 metres. The lonely sequoia towers over the surrounding deodars and Himalayan white pines with its tapering crown and dense foliage. The reddish brown trunk is straight and clear of branches six metres from the ground. The horizontal branches get shorter towards the apex, giving it a conical shape.
Although the tree bears male and female cones, no one has seen a seedling here, possibly because the tree cannot produce enough pollen to pollinate the female cones successfully. Though acclimatised to Kashmir’s climate, the lonely sequoia cannot regenerate naturally.
Equally fascinating is the story of Sleeman’s tree for hanging thugs in Sleemanabad, northeast of Jabalpur, Katni district of Madhya Pradesh. On a peepal tree adjacent to a police station, scores of men, sentenced to die as thugs by the East India Company (EIC), were hanged on the tree. The EIC appointed Col. W. H. Sleeman to address the thuggee menace. Between 1826 and 1848, 4500 were tried for thuggee crimes. In Jabalpur and Sagar alone, 504 were hanged. Some of them were hanged on the peepal tree, but there is no record of the exact number. The tree is about 220 years old. The branch on which people were hanged has fallen off, but parakeets have made their home in the holes on the upper branches of the tree.
The story of the mango tree with the most grafts found in the Abdulla Nursery, Malihabad, Lucknow district of Uttar Pradesh, is equally fascinating. ‘Mango man’ Haji Kaleemullah Khan, honoured with the Padma Shri for his contribution to horticulture, has grafted more than 300 different varieties of mangoes onto a single tree and commercially propagated several new ones through grafts. The tree on which the grafting has been done is known as Al Muqarrar (which means ‘the decision’) and has pride of place in the Nursery. Though belonging to the humble Dussehri variety, the 100-year-old tree is unique, with a cemented walkway around it to facilitate grafting. Almost every branch is adorned with a polythene-covered graft. Among Khan’s novel creations, the Anarkali mango has two skins: an outer orange one that tastes like the Chausa and an inner yellow one that resembles the Dussehri. The new varieties are named after film stars, cricketers, and politicians. With its many flavours, colours and textures, Al Muqarrar is a living example of unity in diversity, writes Natesh.
There are many more amazing trees: Peshwa Baji Rao’s mango tree in Maharashtra, Kolkata’s oldest resident — the 240-year-old Great Banyan, the living roots bridges of Meghalaya, the Wishing Tree, a Divine Jasmine of Assam, the Tree of Enlightenment, the Mahabodhi tree of Gaya, and the Walking Mango Tree of Sanjan, Valsad district of Gujarat.
This book would be a quizzer’s delight. An enterprising tree lover could organise expeditions to the iconic trees of India for students as well as international travellers. If India’s wildlife managers can find mates for lonely giraffes and zebras in zoos, why can’t forest officials find a young partner for the lonely sequoia of Kashmir from the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges? There are probably many more such venerable trees with enchanting legends woven into their roots and leaves, waiting to be discovered and documented for posterity. Climate change is a harsh reality, so we must find and protect these heritage trees. “They help in better biocontrol of invertebrate pests by acting as large reservoirs of their natural enemies. Older, larger diameter trees sequester massive amounts of carbon compared to smaller trees—underlying their importance in mitigating climate change,” the book states.
Banner image: Ber Baba Budha, a jujube tree, located in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Image by Sagar Bhowmick via Roli Books.
Credits
