The trees are dead! Long live the forest!
Dead trees are vital habitats for nourishing life. Then why do we have a problem with them?
Category: Trees
Where Trees Are Storytellers — Walking in Wohlleben’s Woodwide Web
Inspired by Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, Satya Viswanathan goes exploring the forest that inspired its author. Forest-bathing among the oaks, aspens and beeches of Eifel, she comes away feeling a human connection, and maybe something more…
Fall Fable – celebrating the en-masse death of leaves
Every year, leaves die off en masse during fall. What’s the science behind this glorious phenomenon?
Dogwood Day Afternoon – A walk in the flowering woods
Come spring, the first thing you would notice in every pocket of woods in Raleigh, NC are dazzling white flowers. Meet the Flowering Dogwood, the state flower of North Carolina
Flowering Gliricidia is a feast for the Tufted Gray Langur
Few distractions can thwart a morning of birding, especially in late winter when it’s time to “clean up” the migrants. However, stopping to watch a troop of Tufted Gray Langur feast on flowering Gliricidia at Horsley Hills is certainly one
Can the koel find another tree?
Trees are an inconvenience. Leaves falling, light being blocked, snakes showing up, tree roots destabilizing the walls, the need to widen the approach road – we have so many excuses to cut down our trees, and none for planting one.
Rajasthan – A Thar Desert Lifescape
What is west to India is east to Pakistan. But what does the Thar care for such demarcations? Its dunes sift with abandon, and thrum with life
In Rainbows – The Mindanao Gum Tree
Meet the only eucalyptus species native to the northern hemisphere, the Mindanao Gum Tree or Rainbow Eucalyptus, so known for the vibrant colored patterns left by its peeling bark
Encounter: The Sacred Grove at Oorani
The sacred grove at Oorani is the last stand of Tropical Dry Evergreen Forests — a postage stamp-sized green patch in the middle of insipid featureless coastal plain dotted with coconut plantations. It does not exactly draw your attention. That, however, would be a huge miss.
Encounter: Rhododendron, sentinel of the highlands
Never mind its cough-syrupy taste, or its tongue-twister of a name, a Rhododendron in flower is inspiration enough to walk the Himalaya, or the Nilgiris
Manjhi Akshayavat, an immortal Banyan tree
Located not far from Lucknow, the Manjhi Akshayavat, one of India’s celebrated great banyans, is all that survives of the vast forest that once protected it.
Burning Bright – In praise of the Flame of the Forest
Devoid of flower through the year it is like any other tree pale of trunk and green of leaf. But come March, when the Flame of the Forest burns up the landscape for far furlongs,…
When Sky Jasmine rained down
The Indian Cork Tree’s expended blossoms infuse rare magic into the morning after a stormy monsoon night I stay on the coast in Pondicherry. My sense of infinity is linked to the sea. It is not…
A Red Cassia in late flower
The late-blooming Red Cassia sets the avenue canopy aflame, flowering as it does when all colour is spent after the monsoon’s departure In early August I had posted an encounter with the lovely Red Cassia (Cassia roxburghii)…
The Cannonball Tree, an explosion of beauty
In flower the Cannonball Tree is lovely. But, by Toutatis, beware the skull-crushing quality of its menacing fruits