The first thing I noticed were the wildflowers in the grass. The grass in Humayun’s tomb complex in Delhi was dotted with little flowers— lavender-coloured mazus, yellow-hued sorrel, blue pimpernels. If you allow lawns to run a little wild, tiny flowers and herbs join the blades of grass. In a fertile, wild garden, you can have a riot of colour and shapes, miles more interesting than a monotonous grass lawn. As I took in the vistas, I realised spring had struck with a breathless, florid force. Above these miniscule herbs towered a huge tree, boughs spread out, decorated with large, red flowers.
It was impossible not to notice the new semal blooms framed across the centuriesold tomb. Semal, the Bombax ceiba, flowers once a year at spring. It feels like a heritage tree—this is an Indian species which is a source of both beauty and value. In the manner of the best kind of heritage, it is a thing that helps create culture. People eat the flowers and buds in a moist sabzi. Birds, bats and mammals forage at the flowers, a major source of nutrition before the hot summer months. The beauty of the tree—its size and majesty—is also something to be witnessed. Despite the heat, or smoke, semals flower with abundance on road sides and parks both.
I took in the tree, with its attendant birds: a Yellowfooted green pigeon quietly perching on a bare branch, a pair of parakeets doing acrobatics on another, a shikra sternly poised at the very top. Mynas crashed into the flowers, the white patches on their wings looking like pinwheels rolling in the wind.
I took a step back, to see better. And I realised that this is what trees give us. If you allow a tree to grow to its preferred size and height, you will need to take a step back to really look at it. That step back is like an exhale, a moment of meditation, an act of truly seeing. It affords us a moment that is beyond screens. A mature Indian tree asks for us to step back, and appreciate that it takes time to create heritage.
Travelling in Odisha this month, I saw blazing orange breaking the tree-line. These were flowering palash—Butea monosperma—trees. Like the semal, they too flower only once a year at spring. The flowers look like a cat’s claw, in a complex orange colour—lava shot through with notes of red. In Central India—Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh—the trees look like fire through the forest. Looking at the sight of a dry forest nevertheless splotched with orange, it comes to mind that heritage isn’t just built or constructed with stone and bricks, it is also natural—in landscapes with native plants and undulations, in the way a forest learns to save water, in the way trees have different flowering periods to support food needs at different times of the year. Near the bustling city of Bhubaneswar, the palash were upholding torches of heritage. Sunbirds flitted through the blossoms, seemingly drunk on the nectar feast. In the mounting heat, the trees seemed to have a message: with persistence, you can endure, even in the harshest of conditions.