A Botanical Pilgrimage in the Kumaon Hills

Slope after slope of unbroken stands of pine around Almora, with their straight trunks and a bare carpet of fallen needles, had gotten Navendu drowsy. A scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, Dr Navendu Page, is a plant ecologist with a special interest in biogeography: the study of where plants (and other living things) are found and how they came to be there.

It was May. To our west, the Char Dham yatra (tour of four holy Himalayan sites) was in full swing in Garhwal, but we were on a pilgrimage of our own in Kumaon, in eastern Uttarakhand. We were looking for certain plants — some rare, some incongruous — that would lead us not to nirvana but towards insights into their habitat: the Himalayas.

The plants we were looking for are great indicators of specific characteristics of the place where they grow, such as the amount of annual rainfall a place receives, simply because these plants have very specific requirements to grow and flourish. Locating these plants would thus tell us more about how the moist and dry habitats are arranged in the Himalayas. May was a good time to catch them in bloom and use the flowers to differentiate closely related species.

Our party of four included Priti Bangal, an ardent birdwatcher who works with Nature Conservation Foundation, an NGO based in Mysore, and Shivam Kishwan, a PhD scholar at the Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun, who had already travelled these areas extensively. He was our guide on the trip. Well-versed in the region’s flora, he could recall details of specimens from FRI’s extensive herbarium collection and quote the names of collectors and localities with ease.

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The winding mountain road took another turn. The direction that the slope was facing changed — maybe the soil type, angle of the slope, and other factors we don’t quite understand yet changed as well — and we gradually began to see broadleaved trees. Everyone perked up. We were finally in the patch of forest between Almora and Thal, where Shivam had seen the particular tree we were now looking for. Sloanea tomentosa is a tree of moist temperate forests found in Nepal, Bhutan, the Eastern Himalayas, and further east in China, Myanmar and Thailand. It is a fairly large tree (25-30 m tall) of the Rudraksh family (Elaeocarpaceae), with clusters of flowers that look like little bells of wet, shaggy fur and fruits that split open into six-sided stars to expose their bright-red aril-covered seeds, much coveted by birds. And though there are recent records of its occurrence from Himachal Pradesh as well (way to the west), here in Kumaon it is found only in shaded, moist ravines (called a gadherha in Garhwali) like the one we stood in. Fallen leaves at the edge of the road soon led us to the tree that stood sedately a short distance up the slope.

While Navendu and Shivam were busy photographing the flowers and the fruits, Priti and I climbed up the ravine to get a better look from afar. From across the large moss-covered boulders, we were afforded a rare, full view of the tree, its size driven home by our friends who stood under it. A great barbet called from the tree’s upper branches, and a wedge-tailed green pigeon sat in a nest high up on a nearby alder (Alnus nipalensis), a fast-growing, nitrogen-fixing pioneer that can sprout even on barren slopes and then slowly make the place more amenable for saplings of other species.

As we stood enthralled, a yellow-throated marten emerged onto a sunny spot on some rocks on the slope just beyond the Sloanea, behind Navendu and Shivam. Unaware of or maybe unfazed by our presence, it lazily rubbed itself on the rock, lay down for a while and then just as nonchalantly loped away. This shaded bower was home to a lot more life than the Sloanea.

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The next day we went up above Didihat looking for a plant that’s sometimes called batak bel (duck creeper) or ishwarmooli (god root) in Hindi or, scientifically, Aristolochia punjabensis, a climbing shrub that’s native to Pakistan and the western Himalayas. While we’d looked for other plants along moist watercourses, we now sought out a dry, rocky ravine on a hot, dry slope.

Aristolochia has thin woody stems, soft, heart-shaped leaves, and flowers that are tubular with the tube bent in a U, much like a saxophone. It also has a very specialised mechanism to ensure cross-pollination.

The flower’s female parts mature early and are ready to receive pollen as the flowers bloom. A strong, unpleasant smell attracts flies, and because they don’t believe in taking chances, the flowers trap their pollinators in their bent tubes in a mesh of tiny hair. Then, as the male parts mature a day or so later and the pollen is released, the trapping hair withers and the pollen-laden flies are free to leave and seek another flower. In return, the pollinators may lay eggs on the flower, and fallen, decaying flowers on the ground will be ample food for their growing larvae. There are no one-sided stories in nature.

Luck wasn’t on our side, and we couldn’t find an Aristolochia; neither flowers, nor leaves or stems. Perhaps something to return for.

The drive along the Gori Ganga valley, past large epiphyte-laden toona trees, brought us to Munsiyari that evening. At the last stop, before we entered the town, a pied thrush serenaded the setting sun from a treetop. As daylight faded and the temperature dipped, the cloak of clouds that had concealed the mountains dissipated, and we finally got a glimpse of the snowclad peaks of Panchachuli.

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There’s always more to a tree than meets the eye. We miss entirely, for instance, the extensive root systems underground that are linked through a network of mycorrhizal fungi to their neighbours. This network allows trees that are competing for sunlight above ground to also carry on a friendly barter below. We see the sedentary trunk and forget about the slow life rising and falling within. We hear the fluttering leaves but are unmindful of the numerous subtle scents emanating from them: each one a message, like a note in a bottle set adrift upon the breeze, at times summoning help against herbivores, sometimes, bringing solace to troubled souls.

Then, there are the stories and beliefs surrounding trees; like with sakaki (Cleyera japonica), a rather nondescript tree of average height with glossy green leaves and beautifully scented, small, creamy-white flowers found throughout Southeast Asia. The previous day, we’d walked up a dry stream bed in a forest dominated by pine and in the fading light of day found one, unassumingly hidden away. But like an emperor from distant lands travelling incognito, these trees too could lay claim to a legacy that would leave one in awe; for here was the sacred sakaki tree of Shinto Japan.

Once, Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess, upset with her younger brother Susanoo’s antics, hid herself in a cave and the world was plunged into darkness. The gods all had to come together to entice her to come out again, and a sakaki tree, adorned with sacred beads, ribbons, and a large bronze mirror, was central to their scheme. Thus, revered for centuries, this tree has been part of human consciousness for thousands of years.

There were more sakaki trees along the streambed, which was clearly a favoured habitat, a snaking oasis sharply demarcated from the surrounding forest by the seasonal presence of water. These locations, where Sloanea, Aristolochia and sakaki grew, were helping us piece together a jigsaw puzzle. While there is a broad moisture gradient in the Himalayas, with the west being much drier than the east, along this gradient, dry and wet habitats crisscross like the fingers of two clasped hands and sometimes bud off into isolated islands. The result is a patchwork that is hard to get your head around: a series of overlapping yin-yang diagrams.

We were far from seeing the whole picture, but our journey gave us crucial insights into the biogeography of the Himalayas. And as we walked a little further up from the sakai tree, a tiny cupwing, standing in for the sun goddess, came cheeping out of a little overgrown hole in the stream bank. Here was our divinity, emerging from her cave, adding credence to our pilgrimage.