You know a tree is a landmark when there’s a bus stop named for it. When I lived in the suburbs of Chennai, on my long bus ride home from the city, between Pallikaranai and Medavakkam, the conductor would call out, “Puliamaram, puliamaram, puliamaram!”
There was a majestic row of tamarind trees down that road back in the 1980s, but one particular tamarind was designated the Puliamaram bus stop. I learned the names of tropical trees during my first year in Chennai from my botanically learned husband, who had been similarly tutored by his sisters and mother. I myself had grown up in much greener surroundings abroad, but in India I learned to be tree-savvy. It may have been the lack of other landmarks that made me pay attention to the trees. There were few signs on suburban roads and junctions and those were pasted over with MGR posters. People often used old road names or called buildings by the defunct businesses that they had housed three decades ago. What I could count on were the trees, as long as I knew their names.
There is a tree literacy movement now and knowing your trees is supposed to have many benefits. It makes you care about conservation. It helps you protect them better against pests, diseases, and marauding neighbours who declare war on them. To this I might add that it helps you enjoy poetry better if you know exactly what vegetation the poet is yammering on about.
But why stop at the names? Living in the daily embrace of trees, I discover every day that there is more to know about them. They seem to like company, for one thing. The ones that are crowded together seem to grow better than the solitary space hogs. At home we’ve stopped worrying whether our gulmohar is robbing the lemon of space and light. That’s not our karma, we’ve realised. The trees usually figure it out themselves, as they have done long before we came into the landscape. Another thing is that shade comes in different, well, shades. There is dappled light under moringa trees, delicious coolth under rubber trees, and deep shade under aged jack trees even at high noon in May. New seeds take root wherever they find their sweet spot, even under full-grown trees.
There are the good host trees, which harbour small fruits or insects that tempt the birds to stay all day. There are trees that allegedly encourage snakes, according to the anti-tree brigade. There are trees that allegedly will destroy your compound wall, house, and every septic tank in the neighbourhood, to hear that same brigade tell it.
What we discover, again and again, is the individuality of trees. The behaviour of one mango tree gives us no clue to what another mango tree will do. We can only make guesses, and be proved laughably wrong. Each tree has its own face and its own karma, and it will tell you its story.
We live in a generously wooded acre in Palakkad now but my favourite tree here is one that belonged to our neighbour. It was a rosewood that was possibly 75 years old, beautifully balanced because no branches had been cut from it. Half of the canopy leaned into our garden and in the summer a shower of leaves fell like gold coins on our heads. The day it was cut down, to make a front door for the neighbour’s new house, was one of the saddest in our lives. There are magnificent trees all around us and one of them will become a favourite in time, no doubt, but till then that rosewood is still my number one.
