Lalbagh gardens has become one of the regular fixtures in our weekend routine. We love visiting the gardens on Sunday mornings. It is a great way to spend some quality family time outdoors. My daughter loves playing on the grass there and me and my wife enjoy going for long walks. We make sure not to stick on the standard walking routes and go ‘off-route’ to make our experience slightly different and more closer to nature. Couple of weeks back when we took a break from our walking and were sitting on the grass, I saw a tree with low and spreading branches. I thought it would be a perfect tree for introducing my three year old to tree climbing.

My wife pointed at the trunks which looked like aerial root, it must be a Banyan, she said. While my daughter was making up her mind if she liked the idea of climbing the tree or not, I saw this :

This piqued my interest, I had never heard or seen anything like this. On closer inspection, the leaves were very interesting indeed :

I kept one of the leaf for Devjit at office, as he loves collecting such curios.

About a week later, I was back at Lalbagh, this time on the Green Heritage Walk conducted by Vijay Thiruvady of Bangalore Walks. I asked him about this tree and he kindly took us to the tree and narrated several interesting trivia about it. He pointed to another smaller tree nearby, which had two cups in its leaves:

The tree he said is very prone to these variations and depending on how the tree was germinated, leaves might not have any ‘cups’ at all. If a new tree was grown from a sapling, the leaves are likely to have these ‘cups’, however, if germinated from seeds, it is most likely that the leaves will have no ‘cups’ at all.

The tree was initially classified in early 1900s as a new species: ‘Ficus Krishnae’. However a few decades later, it was decided that this was a freak variant of the common Banyan tree and was named as s sub-species: Ficus benghalensis var. krishnae. If this was not enough, the tree has now again reverted back to a species in its own right: ‘Ficus Krishnae’.

Anyways, the tree is a native of India and is very rare. Like most of the native trees of the India, it is said to have medicinal usage too.

Coming to the mythological side of the tree, we Indians have always tried to make sense of things around us and a religious story always comes in handy in explaining things. There are two slightly different versions of stories behind the unique shape of the leaf. In short, Lord Krishna loved butter as a kid and would even resort to stealing it. He needed some place to hide is stash of butter. As per one version of the story, Lord Rama rolled up the leaves of an ordinary Banyan tree, so that little Krishna could hide his butter in it. In another version, Krishna himself rolled up the leaves and used it to scoop out butter. Since then, the leaves have remained rolled up and all the trees are descendants of that tree. Another charming aspect of the story is that the milk like latex that oozes out of a plucked leaf is the butter which Krishna stored. These stories are the reason behind the local name of the tree : Krishna’s buttercup, Krishna vad/ कृष्ण बढ़ , Makhan Katori/ माखन कटोरी .

Another interesting story I came across was that in 2015, on PM Modi’s 65th birthday, Maneka Gandhi gifted him a Ficus Krishnae sapling.

PS: After much deliberation, my daughter decided, she did not want to climb the tree after all. 🙂