Oh, summer vine
- Meher Marfatia
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Celebrating flower power in spaces suffused with spring to summer-blooming trees in a city slowly choking on itself
Tomorrow is designated International Plant Appreciation Day. April 13 annually honours the vital role of flora – providing oxygen, and boosting physical and mental wellbeing in people exposed to the daily clog of smog.
It feels wonderful to share the observations of nature lovers pointing to the fast-vanishing canopy of floral brilliance which still somehow graces the city.
At first stop, I sit on a bench with Celsia Bocarro in the Bandra garden I played in every single evening as a child. Almeida Park, named in honour of her father, Professor JF Raphael d’Almeida, the renowned botanist, mayor and municipal councillor (watch the video).
The only surviving daughter of Professor Almeida’s four, Bocarro explains how his passion inspired him enough to name them for a flower each. “Mine, Celsia, is a small wild flower found in the Western ghats,” she says. “My sister Nymphia was named after the lotus, nymphaea; Yucca was after a desert lily; and Norysca a yellow-white mountain flower.”
Moving on to Bombay’s sole unwalled Parsi enclave. The Dadar Parsi Colony (DPC). More than a hundred years ago its visionary founder, Mancherji Joshi, planned a meticulously detailed street-specific tree planting scheme. The stateliest old-timers fringe avenues here. Mapping them in her book, Trees of Dadar Parsi Colony, naturalist and resident Katie Bagli indexes 60 verdant varieties. From the African Tulip Tree to the White Silk Cotton Tree, she outlines interesting histories. Casuarina, for example, derives from the Latinised version of the Australian Cassowary, whose droopy branches resemble the bird’s plumage. The Guest Tree’s species, “hospita”, owes to Dutch botanist Kleinhoff freely distributing these saplings.
“Summer, to me, is synonymous with a profusion of golden blooms entirely covering rows of Copper Pod trees (Peltophorum pterocarpum) that are the cynosure of all eyes,” says Bagli (watch the video). “The DPC lanes are lined with these grand, ancient trees seeming to roll out golden yellow carpets under my feet. In the evenings, blossoms come wafting down gently on my head, like yellow snowflakes. Parakeets delight in plucking off these blossoms and sucking up their nectar, flower after flower. It amuses me no end to watch this little performance.”
The gold canopies transform to coppery red owing to the copper-hued pods which name the tree. More closely observed, the flower reveals tiny stigma centred at its core, flat as a shield and rust-coloured. This gives the tree its other moniker: Rusty Shield Bearer. Among birds that haunt copper pod branches – including cuckoos, bulbuls, sunbirds and sparrows – is, coincidentally, the coppersmith barbet. Its cry mimics the sound of a coppersmith beating sheets of copper.
But the copper pod is actually Bagli’s second favourite. Her first is the imposing Mahogany. “Beginning in spring and moving into summer, the mahogany trees (Swietenia mahogani) in the colony put on a fashion show of sorts. First, they shed dried leaves, which the BMC sweepers have a hard task clearing piles of in the morning. The massive canopies soon adorn a brand-new garment of pretty pinkish leaves that turn fluorescent green.”
Sailing in on the Lady Nyassa for six months in 1865, the explorer David Livingstone seeded what is considered Bombay’s earliest pinnate-leafed mahogany. Flourishing outside Ador House in the Kala Ghoda district, this was planted at the behest of Governor Bartle Frere. Later, too, visiting dignitaries from Chou En Lai to Tito and Khrushchev were encouraged to sow trees.
The glorious Laburnum has a flaming presence citywide over centuries. As the Indophile editor Sir Stanley Reed said, in a 1920s public address, “The Palms of Gamdevi have given place to the flat-bordered Hughes Road where Gold Mohurs and Peltophorums are splendid in May. I rejoice that one of the side roads radiating from it bears the appropriate name of Laburnum Avenue.”
Naturalist and photographer Sooraj Bishnoi was a puzzled kid when he first spied a
summer-kissed Laburnum in Khar. “I was mystified by what I thought were long bunches of bright yellow grapes hanging from the tree. Noticing fallen flowers on the ground, I realised
these weren’t fruit. After that, I went laburnum-spotting in summers to find these trees in full finery across town. Till today a laburnum in bloom takes my breath away. The sight of the ‘yellow grape flowers’, as I called them as a boy, puts a smile on my face, bringing back warm memories of vacations with friends spent exploring the city – all the while being greeted by these dancing bunches of yellow flowers of the Cassia fistula and skipping around on its yellow carpets below.”
Incidentally, midtown Byculla is said to earn its named from a pair of allusions. It partially alludes to European carriages, known as “gharries” (mostly Plymouths and stately Studebakers), rolling past Cassi fistula trees – the Indian laburnum, “bhaya”. Suffixed with “khala”, which was a threshing floor, the words combined to form “Byculla”.
Commuters between Ghatkopar and Vikhroli are treated to a vision from January to April. Feasting eyes on a tree which gets photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s vote. Bombay’s
own “cherry blossom”, as the Rosy Trumpet Tree is referred to in common parlance, which has already shed most of its gorgeous spring blooms. The emotions evoked by Tabebuia rosea – one among 109 species of its genus which lines the Vikhroli belt of the Eastern Express Highway – appeal to Chaudhuri throughout the months they splash the city pink.
“I find this interesting because the colour I otherwise associate with the city is the grey of depressingly dirty air hanging,” he says. “Commuting by train for years, I hadn’t experienced this stretch of the highway. Now, I occasionally use the car and find myself excitedly waiting for this bit of the road. I slow down to prolong that feeling.”
In public gardens everywhere, boughs currently burst with blooms. Many are endangered – but some fortunately saved with vigilance. Being built above the Malabar Hill reservoir, the Hanging Gardens support no tree species with deep roots. Only flowering bushes and shrubs can be found inside the garden, while large trees lie on its periphery.
“But small trees like the Plumeria or Frangipani (the Indian Champa) do grow in some areas,” says environmentalist Pervin Sanghvi, co-founder of the Save Hanging Gardens campaign. “Plumerias originated from Mexico and other regions of Central America. The flowers bloom like bouquets at the tips of branches and have a symbolic meaning in many cultures, often representing beauty, charm and grace.”
She describes her favourite tree, at the far-left end of Gate 1. “Exuding a heady fragrance, this statuesque beauty stands opposite a gazebo which, on the first Sunday of every month, hosts a band of musicians. In bloom, this tree is the pride of the garden. In 2023, there was a notice stuck on it. For the reconstruction of the Malabar Hill Reservoir, the BMC planned to cut this and 389 other trees of and around the garden. Residents and citizens alike came together to protect them. The fate of many of these trees is yet uncertain. In 2026, to watch this very tree spreading its light in the garden immensely fills our hearts.”
The varied orchestral chirping of birds invited by such flowering trees is unmissable. Writer Sunita Bhargava says the Carmichael Road-Altamont Road strip has always struck a chord with her not only because she lives in its vicinity but because, like the rest of the city, this green stretch is subject to relentless new construction. She says, “When we moved to Altamont Road over two decades ago, the entire stretch from Kemp’s Corner to the north corner of Carmichael Road, was verdant. Bungalows lined both sides of the road – so this was called the Sylvan Mile. We woke to the chirruping of sparrows and koels each morning.”
Architectural gems are rapidly falling to builder greed. Signposts on Carmichael Road say: ‘Quiet. Birds Singing.’ With the steady crank of cranes and the boom of bulldozers, these are, of course, harder than ever to strain one’s ears to hear.
A receded residence set amid spectacular grounds, 1918-erected North End was BPT Chairman S Ramamoorthi’s address from 1986 to ’89. “My botanist wife was delighted by the surrounding sea of green, particularly the mussaenda flowers. We missed peacocks that once strutted around the garden,” he has recollected.
Before his tenure, the family of AL Dias was luckier at sighting the pretty national bird. The BPT Chairman at North End from 1960 to ’64 saw peacocks freely roam the plot encircled by Tardeo Hill. His daughter Rowena says, “I was ‘given away’ as a bride from this home affording us the height of gracious living and luxury.” She loved the loggia and remembers her father pottering about happiest in the shrubbery. Those mussaendas thrilled Dias as they had the Ramamoorthis. “His greatest joy was to keep planting mussaendas in our Goa house. He was absolutely a maali at heart,” she says laughing.
So are a lot of us. Maalis at heart. Even those not physically tending to a patch of their own have to just gaze upward and sigh in satisfaction… Oh, summer vine.
© Meher Marfatia
Multimedia production & digital marketing: Danesh Mistry
Comments