The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Walk in the Woods
Efforts in rewilding the Yamuna Biodiversity Park are bringing in a harvest of flora and fauna to the Capital
NORMALLY, WHEN I visit the Yamuna Biodiversity Park (YBP), in Delhi, I head straight for the large waterbody, used by teeming masses of ducks and large cormorant in winter, for R & R. But this time, the agenda was different. We were there to meet a VIT (Very Important Tree) — the only one of its kind in the whole of Delhi: the one and only golden palash. Now, the palash, a native of Delhi, aka the dhak, flame of the forest, bastard teak and Butea monospera (among the botanical community), normally has lovely lava orange claw-shaped blooms, and is fairly common in parks and gardens. The golden palash, has instead beautiful soft golden petals, velvety to the touch, which, according to Prof CR Babu (the brainchild behind YBP), it obtains due to a mutation which makes the red recessive and brings forth the gold.
The grass, the shrubs and the trees have been planted meticulously by horticulturists using trigonometry
This tree is more common in Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, but here, in Delhi, there is just one standing in solitary splendour.
To get to the tree, we walk down a shady narrow jungle path with Faiyaz Khudsar, the ebullient scientist in charge of managing the park, and soon enough the sheer tranquillity of the place seeps into you like a slow-release drug, making you believe that Delhi with all its raucousness and rudeness, simply could not exist. As a stress buster there could be nothing better, so much nicer than a seven-star spa or Valium.
Up in the sky, a shikra wheels and circles on outspread wings and the trees here are crammed with yellow-footed green pigeons which explode in surprising numbers from them. There’s the background chatter of rosy starlings mustering for their great journey back home, (to Eastern Europe, Central Asia) perching on bare branches, occasionally engaging in practise flypasts. A rosefinch and his girlfriends turn up too, as does, a zitting cisticola — earlier called the streaked fantail warbler, which I nicknamed the ‘scissor-snip’ warbler, because that’s what it sounded like. A tinytot coppersmith is hiccuping away from the top of a spindly tree, going toktok-tok.
Finally, we reach our destination: the golden palash. The ground beneath is littered with fallen blooms, but there are plenty up on the branches, attracting sunbirds like magnets. The petals are downy — a lovely soft gold. We pay our respects and walk towards the end of the smaller waterbody, where a huddle of shovellors accompanied by gadwalls are still lurking, much to Faiyaz’s surprise.
You look around and then suddenly what he’s been explaining to us all along strikes you: all that you see, this lovely wild jungle, is not the work of crusty old Mother Nature but the work of man. The grass, the shrubs, the trees, everything has been planted with meticulous planning that horticulturists employ using geometry and trigonometry to create sterilised gardens like Versailles or the Mughal Gardens.
Here, they had a huge issue with soil salinity. They first put in plants which thrived on a high salt diet and sucked it out of the ground. Not all of it, the soil is still pretty saline, but enough to make other native plants grow. The notorious Prosopis juliflora (Vilayati keekar) was another problem they had to contend with. As they wanted to replicate the natural ecosystems found in the Yamuna basin, they had to burrow into the past and find out what those were. This was no overnight miracle: each step took years to come to fruition. I remember well the barren wasteland this place used to be back when they started in 2002 or 2003.
What hits you harder is when you realise that it is so much easier to destroy all this in no time at all, to hack and burn rather than to plant and grow. And that there are probably countless “wastelands” all over India, waiting for their rehabilitation and rewilding, just like this one had been.