How not to be dinosaurs in a botanic garden

While on the usual Second Sunday group birdwatching outing to Lalbagh, I was asked by one of the participants for the oldest tree there. The collective opinion was that it was the lone surviving Mango tree dating back to the Hyder Ali – Tippu times. Just a couple of decades ago, there were four of them, and all but one died, leaving behind a blank open sunny space, in the very place that they once gave shade to. None were replaced immediately with a clone of the original, and to this day there is a blank, a symbolic vacancy in what should have been a treasured heritage.

For very many decades in the past, during the Commissioner and Princely days, Lalbagh was treated as a botanic garden, as a place of serious learning and collection of plants of both economic and novelty value. It has perhaps the oldest Sapota tree in Bangalore. It also has a couple of the only pines native to Southern India.

Those pines belong to a genus called Podocarpus , and were the only pines which survived the holocaust caused by one of the most violent volcanic eruptions this part of the world has ever seen. It was close to a couple of hundred million years ago and led largely to the extinction of the fauna and flora in India (the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary as the geologists call it). This event also led to the formation of the Deccan Traps. And in the higher reaches of the hills, these pines survived. With its deep green foliage (not needles!) these trees today lend a stately presence to the path that they grace.

But do we know about it? No! We literally see thousands of people at Lalbagh every day. Some jogging, some walking, most chatting. Hardly anybody is interested in what is around. They show no concern for the little plants that are meant to grow there. Not the grass, not the flower beds. There is no concern, no discipline. We have turned it in to a municipal-exercise park.

Maybe it is time for us to do a rethink and put a better value to the legacy that we have inherited. Seriously, maybe it is a time for us to take more pride in the heritage that we are part of. We just need to turn a botanic garden into a place it was meant to be, a place of learning!

 

[13-07-2008. Published in the Deccan Chronicle]