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| Ode to the trees of India |
| Gargi Gupta / New Delhi May 16, 2010, 00:28 IST |
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An American ecologist has been travelling all over India and ‘tagging’ some of the most ancient trees.
Yoav Daniel Bar-Ness is on a singular mission — to catalogue the ‘landmark’ trees of India. The American ecologist on a Fulbright scholarship has been living here for nearly two years now, travelling all over the country to inspect ‘landmark’ trees — from an ancient grove of rhododendron trees in the Sunderdhunga Valley, 3,600 metres above the sea in Uttarakhand in the north, to the magnificent bamboo grove in Puducherry down south, around which Auroville was set up; from the Grand Banyan in the east (said to be the oldest tree in the world) at the Botanical Gardens in Howrah near Kolkata, to the west, the various large trees that still dot the urban jungle in Mumbai. To date, Bar-Ness has tagged 980 trees from around 220 species — all photographed, captioned and mapped as part of the report-work for his project.
Among these are a few of the usual suspects, such as the Bodhi Tree in Gaya and the Adyar Banyan in Chennai. Bar-Ness has also cast his net wide to include trees that have interesting historical or religious associations, and trees that are either very old or uncommonly big or unusually located, trees that few people know about and pass by without even noticing.
For instance, the giant banyan that spreads wide and provides shade to students at Allahabad University or the ‘Hanuman’ Mace, a massive, single-trunked banyan tree towering just above the Dasashvamed Ghat in Varanasi, rarely noticed by the milling crowds, or even the Elephant Ear tree near the Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, so huge and dramatic that it is clearly visible from Chowpatty Beach and Marine Drive.
“Landmark trees are, by definition, trees with a special significance to human beings,” writes Bar-Ness in his project proposal. “Landmark trees serve as advocates for conservation of natural biodiversity in many ways. They are ubiquitous: within the cities, along the rivers, within the villages, at crossroads, and beside the temples... Like us, they are the living descendants of organisms stretching back billions of years, and their forms are fascinating records of evolution and adaptation.”
Bar-Ness, it must be evident by now, is a tree specialist. A graduate of the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington, he has worked in forests all over the USA — the Ellsworth Creek coastal rain forests, Mt Rainier National Park, Clearwater National Forest — and some in Australia, too. His last major project involved studying the arthropods (a variety of invertebrate animals such as spiders, scorpions and the like) that live on the forest canopies of the eucalyptus trees in Tasmania. That involved “rigging, climbing and working on the treetops of the world’s tallest flowering plants, surveying, measurement and 3D computer illustration of forest trees”, as also teaching tree researchers “safety at heights” skills.
His interest in India arose “from one specific piece of paper”, he says. That was the Tree Tour map at his university which described a few of the trees from around the world that were planted on the campus. “The first tree on the list is the Indian Deodar Cedar, which happens to be planted extensively in that region of the world.” Besides, India is a biodiversity hotspot, home to an estimated 15,000 plant species — 6 per cent of the world’s total — including some 300 trees that are considered threatened by extinction. “Nowhere else but in India is there such a combination of forest diversity, environmental pressures, strong appreciation of nature, population growth, and whirlwind economic development. It’s an exciting place to be a conservation ecologist.”
In India, trees, especially ancient, towering ones, have traditionally had associations with spirituality — most temples will have a banyan or peepul tree. Ironically, modern, urban India is also wilfully callous to its plant wealth as trees are regularly cut down to widen roads, construct buildings, etc. It’s a dichotomy that has struck Bar-Ness often during his fieldwork. “Some trees are sacred, and some trees are merely in the way of development. Two contrasting methods of tree preservation stand out for me. In Rajasthan, the Bishnoi grove where 363 people sacrificed their lives for the forest is still intact and is a strong memorial, and in the Punjab, I visited a Sikh shrine named after a historically important tree that had cut down the namesake tree itself to expand the building.”
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