Imagine a flyover or, say, a bridge in a city that connects one place to the other while giving you a wonderful view of the area from high above. One such natural bridge is found in forests on tops of trees, providing an arboreal walkway for reptiles, monkeys and countless other little animals. The bridge in focus is a climbing twisting vine, which with its roots embedded in the ground winds its way up trees, forming a nice little canopy on top. It goes by the name liana with one type being appropriately titled monkey ladder.
Lianas prefer the tropical moist deciduous forests and rainforests where they grow in abundance.
Their stems, such as that of the monkey ladder, may be more than a foot in diameter, often flattened and ribbon-like with even the smallest stems remarkably springy and strong. Lianas compete with trees for sunlight, water and nutrients from the soil.
In India lianas have graced many forests and I have had the pleasure of witnessing them. As we made our way to the famed Sampige Mara (champa tree), in the thick of the Biligiri Hill ranges in south-east Karnataka, which is home to the Soliga tribe, we could see lianas on both sides of the forest path. We were accompanied by two young boys of the tribe – Keta and Raju – who explained how the liana smelt, tasted and its use in food and medicine. Some lianas store water in fresh young shoots and the tribals cut the stem and drink the water during dry season.
At home in Chennai the acacia tree, visible from the window of my room, is home to many climbers and one of them is the liana with its hard and twisted stem. The latter helps form a green canopy in the acacia crown providing a thoroughfare for koels and squirrels that happily move about feeding on berries, flowers and shoots.
Probably one of the best places to observe and study a gigantic and very old liana species known as giant liana (gilla theega in Telugu), which is believed to be 300 years old, is in the Talakona forest near Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. When I visited the place the lianas had large brown, dry and fully ripe fruit that looked like they were about to fall. The seeds (lomentum) of the tree are considered one of the largest in the plant kingdom and measure about three-and-a-half feet. We found an old lady hawking them some distance away for `30 per kg. The seeds are used in healing pains afflicting knees and joints.
I traced a giant liana rooted in the soil, emerging from the ground and winding its way from tree to tree. I tried to measure the length of one of the long woody twisted vines. The bottom portion of the trunk lay flat on the ground and rooted in the soil amidst shrubs for about 10 metres with the girth measuring 3 to 4 metres. It resembled a cross between a hippo and a giant anaconda as it lay on the ground. Then it seemed to unfurl itself and cling to another tree among the shrubs going up to a height of 4 metres.
Here, it divided into three branches (appearing like a large twisted rope) and climbed up again in three different directions. One of the branches of the liana, which I followed, twisted around another tree taller than it up to a height of about 40 feet. Again from that tree it latched onto a third tree, which is about 70 feet in height. Here it reached the canopy and spread all over the tree crown. Overall this giant liana took support or, you can say, stamped its presence over at least 15 tall trees such as the bamboo, jambul, talari and mango tree.
Later on one of the forest guides managed to scale one of the lianas and extract few of its seeds which he gifted to me. I still have them – a wonderful memory of those gorgeous lianas.