by Ruskin Bond
The Papuans of New Guinea take pride in calling themselves the Coconut People. They hate the non-Papuans of their island who, they say, are not true Coconuts. They have a fantastic legend regarding the origin of the coconut. Even before the creation of man, their god killed another god, Somoali by name, who later became the god of the bushmen and the nomads. He placed the head of his victim on the bank of the Wamagao River, and after six nights, when he returned to see the head of his enemy, he found leaves sprouting from it. He then planted the sprouting head in the earth and from it grew the first coconut.
Most botanists seem to think that the original home of the coconut is not far from India, probably ‘somewhere in the lands now under the sea, which existed in the western parts of the Indian Ocean’. All are agreed that its home is somewhere between Zanzibar and New Guinea. The seafaring Polynesians and wandering Malays probably carried it eastwards and westwards. It was probably the adventurous Polynesian mariners who first planted it in the New World.
The Malay seafarers, the once-maritime Tamils and the ancient mariners of the Bengal coast have probably been responsible for a much wider distribution of the coconut into the lands of the Indian Ocean. Ocean currents and monsoon drifts have also played a part in its spread.
So old is the plant in India that from early times the Arabs have called it the Indian Nut. Marco Polo called it by the same name. For Hindus it is the Kalpaka Vriksha, or Tree of Heaven.
Apart from the refreshing qualities of the flesh and water of the coconut fruit, this tree has many uses. In Goa, brooms are made from the leaf ribs, while in Kerala the fermented sap is known as palm wine or toddy. The sugar from the sap gives us jaggery, the fibre from the outer rind provides coir fibre, the dry fleshy kernel provides copra and the oil extracted from the dry copra gives us coconut oil or coconut butter.
Several other palms are well-known in India—the tall, slim betel-nut palm; the shaggy wild date palm; and the palmyra palm, on whose strong leaves the ancient scriptures were written.
Trees of the Himalayas
India is probably nowhere so rich in forests as in the Himalayas, where the hills and valleys provide so many contrasts in elevation, humidity and temperature that a great variety of vegetation is to be found all the year round.
Ascending the foothills, no very sudden change is noticed, and it almost seems that the vast stretch of forest lying in the still heat is merely a duplicate of the forest in the plains. But this is sal forest, which covers the foothills with speed and persistence. The more vigorous sal trees grow rapidly, the weaker bide their time until the death or destruction of their more powerful fellows.
A sal forest has a remarkably individual character, where, from tiny sapling to giant patriarch, each tree ruthlessly waits for the downfall of its neighbour: a restless, ambitious sea of foliage, some trees attaining a height of 150 feet and a girth of twenty feet.
The sal is the most important tree of the lower Himalayas, providing the bulk of railway sleepers in India and yielding, when tapped, a large quantity of good resin. The flowers, tiny and sweet-scented, appear in March, in some places heralding a spring festival, when baskets of them are carried from village to village and distributed to women as emblems of motherhood.
Beyond the sal forests, the hillside changes in appearance. The undergrowth is not so tall. It thins out, and the only features suggesting tropical vegetation are the giant mops of the screw pine and the beautiful tree ferns.
Now the birch and the poplar prevail. The Himalayan Birches, growing singly, are more valued for their bark than for their timber. The bark is cast off in wide, horizontal shreds, and is exported far and wide for tanning, papermaking and lining of hookahs. The poplar’s broad, heart-shaped leaves readily flutter to every breeze; and apart from the tree’s ornamental value, its close-grained timber is used for beams and rafters.
In the eastern hills, where the monsoon is heavy, the atmosphere is too humid for the coniferous family, but just suits the immigrant Japanese Cedar, which grows with such persistence that many of these trees, trim and beautiful and straight, are found at elevations of 4,000 to 6,000 feet—elevations which also happen to suit most of the flora of temperate Europe.
The oak and the chestnut grow profusely above 5,000 feet. The fruit of the chestnut is beloved by the Lepchas of Sikkim, and the wood of this tree provides the big pestles and mortars used for crashing millets, which are converted into local beer.
On the more exposed hills grow the maples, trees of no great size or thickness, but of striking appearance in the spring and autumn by the variety of crimson and gold tints in their foliage. There are several species of maple, and the best drinking cups in Tibet are made from the knobs of one particular kind of tree.
The walnut is a native of the eastern Himalayas, and bears a high percentage of good nuts. It is also in great demand for making furniture.
The rhododendrons and magnolias are the most admired trees of the Himalayas. The rhododendron’s magnificent cluster of pink and crimson bells explains the meaning of its name—rhododendron, rose tree!
Near Darjeeling in West Bengal, the magnolia has deep wine-coloured flowers, which are very fragrant—so sweet that they have been known to cause giddiness to the inhaler.
The pine, deodar, cedar, yew and spruce are all well-known conifers in the Himalayas. Many beautiful bamboos abound in the hills—one species is used by the Lepchas for making bows, another is used in floating heavy logs and a third, when cut, shortened and flattened out, serves the purpose of tiles; it is durable and watertight.
The peach and the apricot, the plum and the cherry, grow wild and in cultivation, and their delicate pink and white blossoms add charm and grace to the grandeur of the Himalayas.
The Loveliness of Ferns
At the bottom of a hill there is a small rippling stream, its water almost hidden by the bright green tangled growth along its course. It is only by its sound, as it chatters over the pebbles, that we become aware of it. Here we come upon many plants that delight to grow in such a place—water mint, wild strawberries, wood sorrel, orchids and violets and dandelions, and a forest of ferns.
The first thing one notices is a beautiful group of ferns growing almost to the water. This is the lady fern, whose broad fronds must be almost four to five feet high—a delicate plant, frail and almost transparent in the fineness of its foliage, and looking so tender that you would think the sun and wind would almost scorch or shrivel it up; but the abundant supply of flowing water keeps these ferns cool and fresh. When the frosts of winter come, the fronds will crumple up into a heap of brown fragments, but their strength has by that time returned into the thick clump of root, to be stored and used for a still finer group of fronds next year.
In the moist parts of any forest there are sure to be several other kinds of fern, such as the male fern, with its strong upright fronds, looking just like a large green shuttlecock, three feet high. One of the commonest of Indian ferns is the maidenhair, which grows along the west coast and in the Himalayan foothills. During the monsoons it can be found on almost every wall and rock—a delicate, tender fern, easily torn by the wind.
On the stump of a fallen tree grow the prickly-toothed buckler fern and the broad buckler fern, whose rootlets penetrate the soft rotting wood to obtain their moisture. They are hardy, often remaining green throughout the winter. The handsome bracken fern often grow to a height of six or seven feet. Then there is the lovely hart’s tongue fern, great clumps of which grow beside the forest path. It has broad green crinkled fronds and is quite unlike other ferns, but if you look at the back of the fronds you will see, from the little heap of rust-coloured spore-cases, that it is indeed a fern—all ferns grow their ‘seeds’ in this way.
There are several hundred varieties of fern. They are easily pressed and preserved. They may also be grown indoors in pots. But they are at their loveliest in the open, in cool damp places, in the depths of a forest or by the side of a mountain stream.
The history of ferns goes back into the mists of antiquity. There was a time when they, and plants like them, filled the earth. It was a wet and dripping time. Flowers would have been of no use at all, but spores could carry on their life in the prevailing dampness. Some ferns grew as large as trees. The falling stems of these tree ferns were floated together by mighty streams, carried away to the sea and buried under sand and mud. The remains of these plants, being thus shut out from the air, could not rot but were slowly changed into coal. The impressions of the leaves and stems of these ferns can be distinguished even now, in many pieces of coal.
As the earth became drier, ferns retired to the shady and damp spots in which we now find them. They are a declining family, but let us hope they will remain with us for some time, for a forest stream without ferns would be like a maiden whose loveliest tresses have been shorn.
Cacti and Succulents
Half a dozen seedlings, very small and queerly shaped, make an instant appeal to would-be gardeners, especially young ones. The strange assortment of letters constituting their names are a challenge in themselves.
To their obvious appeal as small living things needing care, both cacti and succulents add the charm of continuing to live through a period of neglect. They survive knockings-over and being transplanted during enthusiastic periods, and though the very young plants do not flower, they very soon begin to grow ‘young ones’ in the oddest ways. The bryophyllum tubiflorum, for instance, which resembles a small rubbery Christmas tree, grows clusters of very tiny seedlings at the ends of its branches. Each of these have two leaves and a root, perfectly formed, and can be picked off with tweezers and planted in neat rows in a seed pan, where they soon grow into new trees.
Most succulents will grow a young plant on the broken edge of a leaf, if the broken edge is inserted in suitable soil after being left to dry for a few days. The sempervivum family grow young ones all round, like chickens clustering round a hen, and kleinia articulata grows a new one on top of last year’s old one. It will flower in winter, a fine cluster of leaves of bright green and tiny white flowers coming out of the topmost end of the bulb-like stem.
Most cacti are native to the warmer parts of the Americas, especially Mexico and the dry regions of South America. Some species grow in Africa; while others, such as the prickly pear and the night-flowering cactus, have long been naturalized in India. They are desert plants, and are able, by the peculiar structure of their leaves and stems, to endure long droughts.
The cactus family has more than a thousand members, all specially equipped to live in their surroundings. Unlike the leaves found in other plants, cactus plants have many sharp spines with little or no surface from which water could be lost by evaporation. A fleshy stem makes up the major part of the plant. These stems have vast water-storage spaces, which are filled whenever it rains. Many members of the cactus family are quite small, but some, such as the saguaro, reach up to seventy feet, often having as many as fifty branching arms.
Cacti and other succulents are not difficult to grow indoors, provided they can be given plenty of light and fresh air. They should be watered only moderately. Many people grow them for their fantastic shapes rather than for their individual blooms; but the plants must be seen in flower to be really appreciated. The prickly pear and the cereus have very showy flowers. The jumping cactus (so named not because it jumps, but because it will make you jump should you step on it) has beautiful white flowers, often larger than the parent plant. The Queen of the Night blooms only at night. The Christmas cactus bears lovely fuchsia-like blooms.
Cacti have their uses too. The roots of the yucca were used by the American Indians for soap, while in Mexico the prickly pear was cultivated because of the cochineal insect that lives on it and yields a red dye. In India, this cactus is generally used for hedges in gardens and fields.
The Jasmine
The jasmine has also been called the jessamine and jesse; its Arabic name is yasmin, and its Persian name jasemin. The white scented jasmine and the bright yellow winter jasmine (found mostly in the hills) are both native to India, and though they are cultivated in Western countries, they are essentially Eastern plants.
Various species of jasmine are grown in Indian gardens. The delicious fragrance of the flowers is particularly strong in the evening, for that is the time they open their blossoms—unlike most flowers, which open in the morning.
To obtain the evanescent odour of the flowers of the jasmine, a complicated process is necessary. To merely press them or distil them with water would be useless, the essence being too subtle to be captured by any such simple method.
The flowers must first be embedded in fat, to which they communicate their perfume, which is then separated from the fat and obtained in a more elegant form by means of alcohol. The last part of the process is quite modern, but the initial process is as old as the use of perfumes and explains the frequent use of ointments by people in ancient times.
The yellow winter jasmine is one of the prettiest wild flowers. It flowers in the hills in March and April, at a time when there are few other flowers in bloom. Its butter-yellow stars bring to life an otherwise drab hillside. The black shiny berries are eaten by blackbirds, bulbuls and other fruit-eating birds.
As the flowers appear when the plant is yet without a leaf, this hill species is sometimes called the naked jasmine. Such a plant is a pearl of great price, though it costs nothing and can be grown almost anywhere. The slender green angled stem will climb to a height of ten to twenty feet, and the branches, when in contact with the soil, will take root and form thickets of arching stems, soon covering a wide area.
The Flax
The flax, or linum, has been cultivated from before the Christian era, and over 500 years before the time of Homer, who speaks of it as representing an important domestic industry. In Switzerland its cultivation dates from the Stone Age.
Herodotus describes the Egyptian priests as wearing linen garments made from the fibre of the flax. In India, the plant has for long been cultivated not only for its fibres but also for the oil contained in its seeds, which we know of as linseed oil, or alsi-ki-tel.
The flax flower, which comes in both crimson and blue, will grow wild, or in a garden, or in a field. Though Oriental in origin, it is cultivated as far north as Norway. Its extremely light and airy style of growth makes it a most attractive plant.
The fibres inside the stem of the flax plant are very tough and can therefore be used for textile fabrics. To get the fibres, the plants are first stripped of their seeds and then steeped in water until partially rotten, when the gummy part of the stem is dissolved and the fibres loosened.
Next, to separate the woody portion of the stem, they are spread out to dry until the wood inside becomes brittle and breaks into pieces. The fibres are then drawn through a comb, called the ‘hackle’, where they are straightened out and freed from dust. The fibre thus gained has a fine, silky appearance, and is spun into yarn and finally woven into linen cloth.
The thread for making fine lace is usually spun in rooms kept almost dark, to discipline the eye and the fingers in the delicate task of rejecting all that is faulty, and obtaining a thread that is both fine and strong. It is said that the perfect thread should be as fine as the threads of a spider’s web and as strong as a metal wire.
The Glory Ley
The gloriosa superba, or glory lily, is one of our most beautiful plants. During the rains it is often found shooting up in shady lanes or in bamboo thickets. The grace of its form, and the gaiety and warmth of its flowers, have resulted in the superb name the flower bears.
It is a fragile, weak climber, sprouting up from a tuberous root. Its round green stem is long and slender, and it has to seek the support of other plants and objects. For this purpose it uses its tapering tendril-like leaves. The plant climbs towards the freedom of the air and sunshine, unfurling its fire-flowers like triumphant banners. They have no scent, but the showy colours of their petals are able to attr
act insects.
The petals are at first bright yellow with scarlet tips, but as they grow older they become a dark crimson and bend further back. The insects find honey at the base of each petal, thrusting their tongues into the nectar while they hover in front of the flower.
The Water Lily
The beautiful lotus water lily is found in quiet waters everywhere—in peaceful lakes or tanks, and sometimes in artificial ponds. Not only is the lotus sacred to Hindus as the throne of the goddess Lakshmi, but the roots and seeds of a certain species are an edible and popular food.
The sacred lotus has large rose-coloured petals, but the more common water-lily has white sweet-scented flowers of a waxy appearance, which open in the morning and close later in the day. The flowers have many petals, arranged in rows, with stamens of a bright gold colour. It is a favourite subject with artists. The broad leaves spreading over the surface of the water like floating shields add a mysterious charm to a flower about which there are many myths and legends.
Most plants die if their roots and stems are kept under water, but the water lily has adapted itself to its surroundings. The stem is thick and tuber-like, sending down long roots into the soft mud and preventing the plant from being carried away by the movement of water. The leaf stalks are long and reach to the surface, being attached to the centre of the leaf, which floats like a raft. The upper surface of the leaf is covered with a thin coat of wax, which prevents it from getting wet. Any water that touches it just rolls off as it would from a duck’s back.