Greeted by Guazuma!

 26th June 2022

I visited the Nizhal OMR Tree Park after ages.  In my absence, I heard that Urbaser had helped clean the place of plastic and there had been clearing of the subabuls and undergrowth by a machine.

How different the park looked!  The trees stood out, tall and happy, and the Guazuma was ablaze with flowers.

The picture does no justice to the sight that greeted me and filled my heart with delight.

Exotic or not, the tree was resplendent, its branches sweeping all the way to the ground, each bough laden with flowers.  Thenpuchimaram (as it is called in Tamil)  was also buzzing with active pollinators.

The flowers with their pink stamens - fooled Rashmi into thinking this was an overgrown Lantana!  The leaves are hairy, and they are a good trap for dust - quite ideal for our city.

The berries are like rudraksha beads aren't they?

I happily wandered up and down the central path with tool in hand, looking at new leaves, hovering pantalas, screeching parakeets and the little Glory vines with flowers.  One of the obsessions of the Nizhal team is the "bio-fence".  This a green fence being nurtured assiduously by the whole team, and contain two types of plants - one which looks like karvepillai and the other that has these little little glossy leaves.

Now the soil near the border of the plot is probably the worst - rocky, hard, filled with plastic dumped across the wire fence and really those poor little saplings have had a hard time to grow.

June of '21, they played host to these caterpillars. As I loosened the soil around the plants, I let these caterpillars be.

These first instars of the Common Lime needed to be nurtured too.  

And now a year later, those same little caterpillar eaten karvepille like plants have grown 

 and were even flowering!

I was rather delighted at their progress.  Many of them had tendrils of the glory vine curling around their stem.  Now, those I did not let be, I removed them firmly and sent them back onto the steel wire fence

This is the other bio fence plant.  Such lovely glossy leaves and white stars for flowers.

The fig tree was fruiting and the wasps were zitting around.

All was well with the world, it seemed, as my heart felt lighter.