AT ASOLA BHATTI WILDLIFE SANCTUARY, on Delhi’s southern fringe, a patch of wasteland measuring a little over two acres lies enclosed by barbed wire. I visited it in late June, and was shown around by Sohail Madan, a naturalist in his early thirties. Madan, round-faced and balding, runs the Conservation Education Centre, a small non-profit institute based at the sanctuary. On a commission from the Delhi government, he is building a butterfly park here.
The area was overrun with vilayati kikar, an invasive and aggressive tree popularly believed to have been introduced by the British. In his low voice, Madan indicated where workers had uprooted some kikar, where he planned to have a pond, and where he’d marked out a 900-metre elevated footpath for visitors. The plan, he said, is to put in a range of native trees suited to the dry, rocky soil. The trouble is that, with urbanisation rampant and kikar stifling local plants, many trees native to Delhi are increasingly hard to find in the city.
A few days earlier, I had joined Madan and three of his young staff on a road trip to Jodhpur. At the Arid Forest Research Institute, on the city’s outskirts, a senior scientist gave us a long tour of the facility’s nursery and arboretum. Madan produced a wish list of 22 trees and shrubs, and within a quarter of an hour he was beaming. He found saplings of dhau and roheda, and of palash, also known as Flame of the Forest after its bright orange blossoms. He also discovered gugal, a shrub he hadn’t thought of, and added it to his plans. But the prize was peelu, a small tree also known as meswak, whose twigs are famous as natural toothbrushes and which is beloved of butterflies. Trees of Delhi, a field guide by the fimmaker turned environmentalist Pradip Krishen—whom Madan counts as a mentor—describes peelu as a “quintessential desert tree … becoming rare in Delhi and confined to relict patches of original forest that have somehow escaped development.”
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