The Ghost Tree: Courting the Frozen Dancer in the Forest

A series of urgent clicks of the tongue and the jeep we are seated in sputters to a stop. Our guide mutters to the driver before turning to us, whispering almost conspiratorially, “Katrina aur uske teen baccho ka sighting yahin hua, kal shyam.” The effect of his theatre is not lost on me.

It is the beginning of the summer of 2015, my first time in the jungles of Central India and seeing Katrina, the star of Bor Tiger Reserve, is at the top of my wish list. “Keeee-kee-kee”, the piercing screech of a serpent eagle, hangs in the air just like petrichor from the previous night’s rainstorm. Familiar trees like teak, palash, semal are scattered on either side of the track where we are parked, interspersed with the unfamiliar tendu, arjun, ain, and mahua. As the clouds lazily clear and the birds begin to rouse from their roosts, medleys of sunshine and fallen leaves on the forest floor draw my eye to a glimmer of shadowy white in the distance.

Katrina is a no-show. Our jeep noisily starts again, careening along the bumpy road as it picks up speed. As we close the distance, my eyes are still fixed on the shimmer of white. Our guide notices the object of my attention, seizing the distraction to sidestep our failed tiger sighting, “Madam, yeh hai humara ‘Ghosht Tree’, jungal ka sabse shandaar ped”.

Where I was passably acquainted with the Western Ghats forests between Mangalore and Chikmagalur, the dry deciduous forests of the Deccan Plateau were slightly alien. That is until I was romanced here. India’s smallest tiger reserve, Bor, became the first of numerous spectacular, Central Indian backdrops to a blossoming courtship between me, the ghost tree (Sterculia urens), and my companion on that safari in 2015, a human male.

Sterculia urens is a wild enigma. It is often found in solitude from other members of its species, on rocky eroded slopes, striking a graceful pose — a frozen dancer. The tree is exceptionally drought tolerant and can grow on the poorest of stony soils, thereby having the potential to be used to regenerate or reclaim these types of lands. The tree remains leafless for nearly half the year, starting in December and extending until fruit production in April-May. The flowers confer the tree its name urens (flaming), owing to the little stinging hairs that appear on the naked tree between January and March. Lacking petals, the yellowish-green leathery sepals covered with red hairs look like starfish dangling in the air.

To mark a relationship milestone in 2022, my partner (the same human male from 2015) and I went on a safari in Umred-Pauni-Karhandla Wildlife Sanctuary, where our guide quipped as we passed a ghost tree, “Yeh dekho, female ghost tree”. Having a degree in botany, I can say with certainty that ghost trees are not strictly male or female. They are andromonoecious, having male and bisexual flowers on the same plant, with male flowers far outnumbering the latter. So, this random ascription of the feminine gender perplexed us. Understanding dawned later when we saw it from the other side. The trunk of this particular tree displayed a rather voluptuous human female torso, which may have piqued the interest of some lonely forest guard on many a cold night.

The flowers also exhibit cryptic monoecy, wherein bisexual flowers have functioning female parts but sterile male parts. Apparently, this confounding setup ensures pollinator attention to the flower via the colourful-but-sterile anthers. Until recently, the tree was thought to be pollinated by a single pollinator, the Indian honeybee (Apis cerana indica). Explanations about the bee’s lackadaisical efforts were put down to the fact that since payment was only in pollen and not nectar, bees strayed to its more generous neighbour, the Indian frankincense tree (Boswellia serrata), which comes into bloom around the same time. However, new information in 2021 indicates that the tree is actually pollinated by thrips, which use its flower buds as breeding sites and feed on the pollen. Thrips are short-distance fliers and end up fertilising flowers with pollen from the same plant (geitonogamy), resulting in low fruit numbers.

Most Sterculia members share an unfortunate and unpleasant feature from which their genus name comes. The flowers emit an unpleasant odour similar to what, one may suppose, Sterculius, the Roman God of manure, was deemed to smell like. This odour is especially pronounced in the ghost tree’s city cousin, Sterculia foetida, the Indian almond. When a tree’s scientific name translates to “manure stench”, you know that the taxonomist meant business. The Indian almond (or as I fondly call it by its other common name, bastard poon) has been planted along roadsides in so many Indian cities, just like the one outside my current home in Hyderabad. One morning in February, my domestic worker looked horrified as she walked in. She urgently announced in Telugu, “Amma, come quickly; I think someone has defecated in the garden; it is smelling bad”. Safe to say, this tree isn’t planted for its perfume but rather for its bright red pods and generous canopy.

Knowing the etymology behind the genus name, I discovered an ironic, perhaps irrelevant, titbit that Sterculia members were previously placed in the now-defunct family Sterculiaceae. This family famously includes Theobroma cacao, the tree that yields everyone’s favourite dessert, chocolate. Suffice it to say, “chocolate tastings” were never the same for me.

While documenting the People’s Biodiversity Register on behalf of Nagpur city, I uncovered the tree’s significance to local tribes. Its shining, flaky bark can be peeled off to make fibres for coarse cloth and rope. The roasted seeds are consumed, and the seed oil used in soap making. Gum karaya or Indian tragacanth, which oozes from the tree, finds enormous commercial use in the food, pharmaceutical, dental, cosmetic, and bioremediation industries. This gum is an important Non-Timber Forest Product sustaining several poor tribal and rural populations. It is also an important traditional medicinal ingredient. Unfortunately, overextraction of this gum threatens the species’ survival in India. Add to that are its pollination limitations, which lead to low seed outputs. And, to make matters worse, germination success is also poor, and since seeds are the major source of regeneration for the tree, it has been declared endangered and is slowly disappearing from its natural ecosystems.

The grasslands of Zilpi, some 30-odd km from Nagpur, house my favourite ghost tree. Hovering over an ephemeral stream, branches outstretched, it holds clues to hideouts of Indian foxes, brown fish owls, and fulvous leaf-nosed bats. But its greatest value to me is the space it held for my human and me to fall in love as we wandered the golden grasslands looking for birds and wolves, our heads in the clouds, planning our shared future together. Each time I’ve visited since, it’s there, a living time capsule offering up memories of unfettered, giddy love. And that makes it all the more worth cherishing.

Photos sources: fruits, inflorescence, bark, roots