Planting Banyans in Bannerghatta

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in Bannerghatta, India – an hour outside of Bangalore – to get

some experience working on a couple of different conservation projects with A Rocha India. They’re currently running 15 projects in the local area focusing on wildlife research, landscape conservation, and community education. One of the key projects I came to take part in is afforestation of the forest fringes which have been encroached by farmland over a few generations. I’ve helped run some tree planting projects in the UK, but was curious to see what the cultural take is on biodiversity restoration here in India. The centre I’m staying at is on the fringe of Bannerghatta National Park. As part of the Eastern Ghats (the mountain range which stretches down the south eastern coast of India) it is made up of arid, deciduous forest, but as it is currently the end of the monsoon season the greenery is still quite lush. It supports a lot of wildlife including Asian elephants, bison, leopards, sloth bears, civet cats, and hosts of insects, reptiles and birds, which often converge with the lives of local villages surrounding the forest. The sheer abundance of life here is hard to get your head around – your mind can’t even process the number of different species of trees, epiphytes, birds and butterflies towering over you. The area chosen to work on during my visit is an hour away from the A Rocha centre, along bumpy jungle tracks and rock outcrops, and through quiet colourful villages. It’s made up of about five acres of scrubland scattered with a few palm trees and cows, which had been used illicitly as a monoculture coconut farm for generations until it was seized back by the Forest Department, who then asked A Rocha to help restore it to its original state.    

The first step of the afforestation process was to fell the coconut trees – if we didn’t do that the farmer could still claim the fruit as his produce and try to keep some control of the land. Then we mapped out the site and went to select saplings to use in the plantation. The nursery we went to apparently had quite limited species available as it’s near the end of the rainy planting season. However, to me they still seemed to have a huge selection of tropical trees including jackfruit, papaya, Indian almond, custard apple, teak, mango, and many more. We had to choose saplings which wouldn’t attract elephants (elephant crop raiding is a huge issue in this region), so we went with banyan, bamboo, neem, tamarind, and jamun, somehow managing to fit the jungle of 200 saplings into the safari truck! The process of preparing the area for planting demonstrated the challenges of land restoration when there are several stakeholders involved: the Forest Department who technically owned the land were all about efficiency, and hired a JCB to dig huge trenches to easily slot the trees in. The JCB was amazing to watch – it could get over any obstacle by using its diggers on either side to hoist itself around like a crab. (However it couldn’t outsmart a burst oil pipe – we had an amusing drive through the night to find a village which had a replacement for it). A Rocha on the other hand wanted to plant more sensitively and not rip up all the topsoil with its valuable mycorrhizal networks, and thirdly, local herdsmen wanted to keep their cows and goats grazing on the land, who would inevitably devour the saplings. After a few altercations in the local language Kannada which I couldn’t understand, everything seemed to be sorted – the JCB would dig pits instead of trenches, and we could begin planting.

On the day of the plantation drive we had a group of students from Bangalore city helping us, and also a half-German, half-Indian expert in land restoration called Sandi. We were told to place the saplings deep down in the pit, then sprinkle on some manure (from the A Rocha goats), and then cover with topsoil. At first I thought putting the saplings so deep down in the ground was strange as in the UK we generally keep the top of the root ball in line with the surface of the ground. But I learned that it’s an Indian technique to plant in pits as it retains water around the sapling during the dry season. We watered the saplings in using buckets of water from a beautifully decorated tractor and water tanker - even the heavy machinery here is covered in hand-painted designs. We mixed up the saplings as much as possible to imitate forest tree populations (even though the part of the forest we were working next to was a non-native eucalyptus plantation, courtesy of British colonists in want of timber). The students worked incredibly hard to plant all 200 saplings, smiling and chatting despite it being a blisteringly hot day, and running out of drinking water halfway through! Their efforts even got us into a newspaper in Bangalore. The survival rate of saplings on this kind of project can be discouragingly low (Sandi thought only 20%), but many of the trees have a large spread, so they will need the space later on. A Rocha will return periodically to monitor the development of the site and the health of the saplings.

It's been very interesting learning about local people’s relationship with trees over my time here – especially how they hold a lot of religious significance. It’s common to see sacred banyan trees in a village square beautifully decorated with strings and ribbons tied around them. These ribbons represent wishes, and they are removed once the wish has been granted. Marriage to trees is also apparently a Hindu practice here – there are sometimes spiritual obstacles placed on a first marriage, but if you instead marry a tree and then fell it, you technically become a ‘widow/er’ and are free to marry whomever you wish. Aside from spiritual significance, people’s lives are practically very intertwined with local tree populations – sometimes literally, as I’ve seen trees growing up through the middle of houses or shops, allowed to remain as a feature of the building and painted the same colours as the walls. Farmers depend on crops of fruit for their livelihoods - the variety and abundance of fruits available is also amazing – my friend told me that during the mango season people here eat so many mangoes that they wear ‘mango clothes’ so they don’t stain their regular clothes orange! Local knowledge of the trees is remarkable – children as young as five in the villages we visited could run and lead us to the trees we wanted to study.

On my way through Bangalore city when I first arrived, I saw a roadside plant stall with a banner above it saying: ‘Plants for Save all Earth’. I thought this was sweetly optimistic, and fitting since I was coming to work on a tree planting project, but one of the big discussions I’ve come across through the work is whether tree planting is actually such a good thing. Sandi, (who has spent decades soaking in horticultural experience, wears no shoes, and emphasises the need to relate to the land you’re trying to restore), led an interesting conversation on this topic. His opinion is that tree planting en masse is not always - or ever - the best thing to do to restore a landscape. If humans destroyed the landscape, he said, how arrogant is it that we then tell the landscape what’s good for it? Of course it’s a very complex discussion – there are lots of good reasons for planting trees in different circumstances, and it’s never a bad thing to do in itself. It has a lot of value in raising awareness for climate issues, and allowing community involvement in conservation. However Sandi was arguing that it’s become such a buzzword for 'saving the planet', when actually there’s a lot more to a landscape than trees – and some landscapes (e.g. grasslands) aren’t even supposed to have trees on them. The best thing you can do in his perspective is to leave the land untouched and allow nature to regain autonomy naturally – essentially rewilding. But if you want to plant trees, they need to be species that are already present in that landscape, and you need to plant in a way which leaves room for other biodiversity to flourish too, (he suggested in a semicircle with empty space in the middle). An issue that our project faced in this respect was that a lot of the native trees in the Bannerghatta forest aren’t available from nurseries as they have little commercial value. Therefore, A Rocha’s next project which I’m hoping to be involved in over the rest of my stay is to create a nursery to propagate some of these species and make them available to other organisations, so that future restoration work can be as sensitive and valuable to the local landscape in Bannerghatta as possible.

The key takeaways from the project have been:

• The importance of forming a personal relationship with the land you’re working on and really knowing it (maybe by walking on it with no shoes?)

• Look at what’s already there and cultivate that, thinking about all the different layers of biodiversity. The landscape knows what it needs by itself!

• The community needs to be on board for the project to work. Use the resources it can offer

• Take the time to research and do your projects well - don't rush or take on too much. But also leave room for failure - this is natural.

• Have a designated mango shirt