Ruskin Bond's Book of Nature

by Ruskin Bond

  From five to nine thousand feet, there are several varieties of oak: Quercus lamellosa, the bak, attains a height of hundred feet and after a century of growth becomes hollow though it has a girth of twenty to thirty feet. Its acorns are large, two to three inches in diameter. This oak comprises most of the Himachal forest.

  Q. pachyphylla (barakatus) also has very large acorns, occuring in threes and bedded deeply in their scaly cups. Q. Spicata does not ascend beyond five thousand feet and carries its acorns on spikes. Q. acuminata is the species found on Birch Hill, Darjeeling; the leaves are silvery beneath. These are all oaks of the eastern Himalayas. Above nine thousand feet in Sikkim, they are replaced by a species of hazel (Corylus).

  In the northwestern Himalayas, on the other hand, the common hoary oak or karsu is amongst the most alpine of trees growing up to eleven thousand feet. This is Q. semecarpifolia. Other oaks, found throughout Himachal, Garhwal and Kumaon, are the ban or banj (Q. incana) and moru (Q. dilatata), which is next in importance to the pines. Vast forests of them occur in various places, and the trees—if not lopped—attain a great size, eighty to hundred feet in height. They prefer dry situations, and are not generally found close to a river.

  Of the Conifers, Pinus longifola (chil or thanea) is the most common, growing from three to seven thousand feet, from Simla to Darjeeling and Kangra to Bhutan. It endures the most heat and the greatest variation in the amount of moisture. This is the pine from which we get our resin and turpentine.

  Pinus excelsa (chir) is also found extensively in Garhwal, Simla, Sirmour, Bhutan and Nepal, but at higher altitude, ranging from seven to eleven thousand feet. You can recognize it from its drooping branches. It also grows sparingly in western Tibet.

  Pinus Gerardians (chilgoza, neoza) is confined to the northern and drier slopes of the Himalayas. Above Chini (on the Hindustan-Tibet road) it is the principal tree of the forest, producing a very large cone containing edible nuts which, when roasted like chestnuts, are agreeable to taste, though with a slight flavour of turpentine. The seeds, of which there are more than a hundred in a cone, are collected and stored for winter use, being a regular article of food in Tibet and Afghanistan.

  The deodar (Cedrus deodarus, Himalayan cedar) gets its name from the Sanskrit deva-daru (divine tree), and this is its name in Garhwal and Kumaon; but in the Jaunsar Bawar district of Garhwal and in Himachal it is known as the kelu or kelon. Its timber is always used in temples for doors, walls and roofs.

  No one would deny that the deodar is the noblest and most godlike of all Himalayan trees. It stands erect, and though in a strong wind it may hum and moan, it does not bend to the wind. The snow slips softly off its resilient branches. It thrives in the rain and it likes the company of its own kind, preferring the sheltered moisture-laden mountain sides to those facing the prevailing winds.

  The average girth of the larger deodars is about fifteen to twenty feet, but isolated trees often attain a greater size. One giant deodar (measured by Madden in the last century) was two hundred and fifty feet high, twenty feet in girth at the base, and more than five hundred and fifty years old. Such giants are rare today, most of them having fallen to the axe in the 1950s, a decade when India, and in particular the Indian Himalayas, suffered greatly from deforestation.

  The timber of the deodar has always been highly prized for house building (especially in Jaunsar Bawar and parts of Himachal, where deodars are most at home), and for building boats, railway sleepers and bridges. The timber is not affected by extremes of climate. The pillars of the great mosque built by Aurangzeb at Srinagar (Kashmir) show no signs of decay, although exposed to the action of water for over four hundred years. Many deodar bridges in Srinagar, along the Jhelum, are even older.

  Perhaps my favourite Himalayan tree is the horse chestnut; extremely friendly and cheerful, especially when in full foliage. It is bare in winter, allowing the sun to stream through its straight, smooth branches. In March, the leaf-buds appear. In April, the blossoms, pale pink candelabra, hang in clusters, attracting bees and small birds. In May and June, when the sun is really hot even in these higher altitudes, the tree is in full leaf, providing welcome shade. The leaves rustle in the slightest breeze, chattering and gossiping among themselves for hours on end. Towards the end of the rains the chestnuts ripen, providing endless enjoyment for small boys, who play with them, and for long-tailed langurs, who feed on them. Then the leaves fall, curling slowly downwards until they form a crumbling yellow carpet on the hillside.

  There are other chestnuts. C. trifuloides has velvety young leaves which later become firm and shining; the fruit is loved by Lepchas, and the wood provides the big pestles and mortars used for crushing the grain of a millet which is converted into the local beer. C. argentea is a lofty tree with edible nuts.

  In the more exposed places grew the maples, trees of no great size or thickness but easily distinguished even at a distance, especially in the ‘sunset of the year’ when their foliage reveals an astonishing variety of crimson and gold tints. They can also be recognized by their peculiar reddish brown fruit and distinctive leaves. A. hookerii is the most frequent at seven thousand feet. A. sikkimensis has its young leaves bright green and serrate, which become entire and heart-shaped as they grow older. A. oblongum with oblong leaves, green above, whitish and hairy below is a moderate-sized tree with a wood close-grained and elastic; the best drinking cups in Tibet are made from the knobs of this tree.

  Juglans regia, the walnut, is a native of the Himalayas. Juglans means the nuts of Jove, for in the Golden Age, they were preserved as food for the Gods, man being content to live on acorns! In Germany, at one time, it was compulsory for a young man to plant a certain number of walnut trees before he could marry.

  A bit of folklore common to both East and West is that the walnut is good for the brain, this belief arising from the fact that the fruit of the walnut is shaped almost exactly like the human brain.

  On the Hindustan-Tibet road, a wonderful trek when I was a boy, walnuts grew in abundance in the wide Chini valley. In the month of August the whole valley was golden with ripe apricots and in the same season the vineyards near the river produced luscious grapes of many varieties. The climate was well suited to fruit growing. Peaches, pears, plums, apricots, apples, all grew in profusion, along with many kinds of garden produce. In the forest bungalow at Pangi was a large table of deodar wood almost completely covered with the self-carved names of travellers who had passed that way. The oldest names were those of two officers of the fourth Hussars, inscribed September 1870.

  Ramgarh, in Kumaon, was the place to be in apple-blossom time. One was literally hemmed in on all sides by a riot of white, a sea of apple blossoms.

  Apples were first introduced in the Himalayan valleys by European settlers who started the first big orchards: Wilson at Harsil (near Gangotri), Banon in Kulu, and Wheeler in Ramgarh. The lower end of the Ramgarh valley is five thousand and five hundred feet above sea level against the upper end’s seven thousand and five hundred feet, enabling about two hundred varieties of apple to grow, as well as peaches, cherries and apricots.

  The visitor to Ramgarh should proceed further and savour the delights of a trek to the Pindari Glacier. The great tree rhododendron accompanies you most of the way, as well as walnuts, chestnuts and oaks. Dutch clover, honeysuckle, wild thyme, blue sage and larkspur tempt you to stop again and again. But perhaps most memorable of all (in spring) are the blue primroses that at Dhakuri and Dwali thrust their heads up through the snow.

  The rhododendron is probably the most admired tree throughout the Himalayas. Its magnificent clusters of pink or crimson bells explain the derivation of the generic name, rhodon (rose), dendron (tree), rose tree.

  In Sikkim, in the last century, Dr Hooker gathered, in two days, seeds of twenty-four kinds of rhododendrons. In the delicacy and beauty of their flowers, four of them stand out; they are Rh. aucklandi whose flowers are five and half inches in diameter; Rh. maddeni, Rh. dalhousie and Rh.
edgworthii, all white-flowered bushes of which the first two rise to the height of small trees.

  In the Tonglo mountains, in Sikkim, the trees in order of prevalence were the scarlet Rh. arborcum and barbatum, the latter thirty to forty feet high, both loaded with beautiful flowers and luxuriant foliage; and Rh. falconeri, from the point of foliage the most superb of all the Himalayan species.

  Rh. arboreum (the bras of Kumaon and Garhwal, the urvail of Jhelum, and ‘mandal’ of Himachal) is the tree rhododendron, growing at an altitude of eight thousand feet in the northwestern Himalayas. It is one of the most beautiful of all trees, having a gnarled trunk and deep crimson flowers in masses. The bright red, slightly acidic flowers, are made into jelly. The soft brown wood was once used for making charcoal and for building houses of the zamindars.

  Rh.argenteum, the white-flowered rhododendron, is found in Sikkim at an elevation of eight thousand and six hundred feet. Its leaves are very beautiful, the leaf-buds erect and silky. It outlives the scarlet rhododendron and grows as tall as forty feet, with magnificent leaves twelve to fifteen inches long, deep green, wrinkled above and silvery below. Few plants exceed in beauty the flowering branch of this tree with its wide-spreading foliage and glorious mass of flowers.

  Another beautiful Himalayan species is Rh. barbatum, a tree forty to sixty feet high, branched from the base.

  Rh. campanulatum is found in the Sutlej valley between Rampur and Sungnam, at an elevation of ten to fourteen thousand feet, and on the Kashmir mountains. The leaves from the Tibetan and Kashmiri varieties glory in the names of Barg-i-Tibet and Hulas-i-Kashmiri, and are used as snuff. They produce vigorous sneezing. The tree is quite abundant and the bark is used for paper-making.

  Rhododendron cinnabarinum (the kema kechoong of the Lepchas) is, on the other hand, to be avoided. It is said to be poisonous, and when used as fuel causes the face to swell and the eyes to inflame.

  Rh. falconeri, a white-flowered species, never occuring at less then ten thousand feet, is one of the most striking and distinct of the genus. It is found in eastern Nepal, and from the point of foliage is perhaps the most superb of all the Himalayan species, with trunks forty feet high and leaves nineteen inches long. The leaves are deep green above, and covered beneath with a rich brown down.

  Rh. nivale spreads its small rigid branches close to the ground. The most alpine of woody plants, it was found by Dr Hooker at an elevation of seventeen thousand and five hundred feet. There are a number of other varieties, and we must not forget to mention Rh. wallichii, with its lilac-coloured flowers.

  Associated with the rhododendrons are the magnolias, of which there are three varieties; Magnolia excelsa, the prevailing white-flowered one, which blossoms so profusely in April that parts of the hillside appear to be snowed over; M. cambelii is more sparingly branched, but has immense pink cups which unfortunately fall early; and a deep wine-coloured magnolia (very similar to that found in Japan), which is perhaps the most handsome as it is the most fragrant—behaving quite against the Darwinian theory that white flowers smell sweeter than red.

  Magnolias have been known to produce nausea by the strength of their sweetness, so that ‘to die of a rose in aromatic pain’ is not so great a flight of poetic imagination as might be thought.

  Michelia lanuginosa is found at six thousand feet with white flowers and long velvety leaves. America is said to be the home of the species, but the Sikkim Himalayas show many more varieties than do the Rocky Mountains, and they are far more gorgeous. At one time these exquisite trees were exported widely to the world’s gardens, thriving in northern Europe where they adapted well to the rigorous climate.

  Of the bamboo, the most gigantic of the grasses, there are many genera and species, varying greatly in size. Many beautiful bamboos abound in the hills: some converted into the drinking vessels of the Lepchas; some used in floating heavy logs; and others in roofing, for which purpose the columns are cut short and flattened out, to serve as tiles; they are considered durable and absolutely watertight.

  The town of Dehra Dun, about hundred and fifty years ago, was chiefly noted for its clusters and avenues of large bamboos, ‘forming the principal feature in the beauty of the Doon ever since the valley became known to us’ (Capt. Sleeman). They must have died out, or been cut down to make way for buildings in an ever-expanding city; today there are only a few corners where these great bamboos can still be seen.

  In September, towards the end of the rains, the hillside is covered with a sward of flowers and ferns: sprays of wild ginger, tangles of clematis, flat clusters of yarrow and lady’s mantle. Dastura stramonium grows everywhere with its graceful white bells and prickly fruits. And the wild woodbine, Lonicera formosa, provides flutes for the hill boys.

  Aroids of the genus Arisoema are quite plentiful throughout the Himalayas, and attract attention by the extraordinary resemblance to a snake with a protruding tongue—hence their popular name, cobra lily.

  As a family they cannot lay claim either to beauty or fragrance, though so nearly related to the lovely Nile lily. Their abominable scent is, however, one of Nature’s marvellous provisions for fertilization, since flies and beetles and other noxious creatures distribute their pollen. If the spathe is opened, the central stem will be seen to be covered with minute petal-less florets arranged in rings, sometimes each sex on a separate spike; at other times both in one house but with the males in a higher belt. The serpent’s tongue is an admirable landing-stage for flies, etc. who, crawling over the male flowers in their eager search for the liquor that lies at the base of the spike and is most appealing to their depraved appetites, fertilize the female flowers as they proceed.

  Arisoema wallichii, a plant with a handsome black and white mottled stalk and a heavy crown of three large leaves, bears its deep purple spathe close to the ground, for the convenience of its special visitors—the ants and other crawling insects.

  A. helleborifolium is much more elegant, having a crown of slender leaflets and a delicate green spathe ribbed with white, and the spadix prolongs into a far-protruding thread. This is the first of the aroids to appear, even before the rains commence.

  Another cobra lily, which rejoices in the name of Sauromatum guttatum, bears a solitary leaf and purple spathe. When the seeds form, it withdraws the spike underground, and when the rains are over and the soil is less moist, sends it up covered with scarlet berries. In the opinion of the hill people the appearance of the red spike is more to be relied on as a forecast of the end of the monsoon rains than any meteorological expertise. Up here in the temperate Himalayas we can be perfectly sure of fine weather a fortnight after that fiery spike appears.

  V

  Trees

  Trees have always played an important part in my life. The litchi, guava, mango, jackfruit and lemon trees of my childhood. Later, the grandeur of the banyan, the sacred peepal, the sal and the shisham. And here in the hills, the stately deodars and fragrant pines. Long ago, I made some notes, short essays, on some favourite trees, and now I share these with my readers.

  The Gurdians of My Conscience

  The trees stand watch over my day-to-day life. They are the guardians of my conscience. I have no one else to answer to, so I live and work under the generous but highly principled supervision of the trees—especially the deodars, who stand on guard, unbending, on the slope above the cottage. The oak and maples are a little more tolerant, they have had to put up with a great deal, their branches continually lopped for fuel and fodder. ‘What would they think?’ I ask myself on many an occasion. ‘What would they like me to do?’ And I do what I think they would approve of most!

  Well, it’s nice to have someone to turn to . . .

  The leaves are a fresh pale green in the spring rain. I can look at the trees from my window—look down on them almost, because the window is on the first floor of the cottage, and the hillside runs at a sharp angle into the ravine. I do nearly all my writing at this window seat. Whenever I look up, the trees remind me that
they are there. They are my best critics. As long as I am aware of their presence, I can try to avoid the trivial and the banal.

  Notes on My Favourite Trees

  Dehra was a good place for trees, and Grandfather’s house was surrounded by several kinds—peepal, neem, mango, jackfruit, papaya and the ancient banyan. Some of them were planted by Grandfather and grew up with me.

  There were two kinds of trees that were of special interest to me—trees that were good for climbing, and trees that provided fruit.

  The jackfruit tree had both these qualities. The fruit itself—the largest in the world—grew only on the trunk and main branches. It was not my favourite fruit, and I preferred it cooked as a vegetable. But the tree was large and leafy and easy to climb.

  The peepal was a good tree to sit beneath on hot days. Its heart-shaped leaves, sensitive to the slightest breeze, would flip gently when the clouds stood still and not another tree witnessed the least movement in the air. There is a peepul tree in every Indian village, and it is common to see a farmer, tired at the end of an afternoon’s toil in the fields, being lulled to sleep by the rustling of its leaves.

  A banyan tree, as old as the town of Dehra itself, grew behind our house. Its spreading branches, which hung to the ground and took root again, formed a number of twisting passageways which gave me endless pleasure. I could hide myself in its branches, behind thick green leaves, and spy on the world below. I could read in it too, propped up against the bole of the tree with my favourite books.

  The banyan tree was a world in itself, populated with small beasts and large insects. While the leaves were still pink and tender, they would be visited by the delicate map butterfly, who committed her eggs to their care. The ‘honey’ on the leaves—an edible smear—also attracted the little striped squirrels, who soon grew used to my presence in the tree and became quite bold, accepting peanuts from my hand. Red-headed parakeets swarmed about early in the mornings.