Palash, shimul and tropical almond

First I took the Hatirjheel circular bus from Rampura bridge and got off at the very last stop, and from there I began walking the whole length of it, looking at everything as I went. The first ones I met were palash, the flame of the forest, and shimul, the red silk cotton tree, and after them the tropical almond, our kathbadam. The almond trees were covered in flower from top to bottom, and they were a pleasure to look at. As I went on along the footpath I found a good number of mahogany trees along the edge of the water, with wild date palms among them. The other trees that catch the eye here are the hijal, and now and then a mahua.

A kingdom of yellow and lollipop jhau

A little further on, the one spreading its yellow everywhere was the ranichura, Senna polyphylla. Oh, and radhachura, the peacock flower, is present in plenty of places here too. Then came a flyover. Along its edges the lollipop shapes of jhau trees stretched all the way to the far end, with bougainvillea tucked in between them. After that began the play of kamini, the orange jasmine, and kanchan, the orchid tree, with debkanchan alongside. It was fun to see them turn up one after another. The frangipani, kathgolap, Plumeria obtusa, in its various forms caught my eye as well.

Sparks of fire and clusters of oranges

A bit further on, another flyover. Around it there was nothing but bottlebrush and more bottlebrush. Every tree had flowered well, and it looked as though sparks of fire had been splashed over them. And here the fruits of the kantamehedi, the golden dewdrop, truly charmed me, because never in my life had I seen its fruit like this. At first I thought the bushes were hanging with bunches of ripe oranges.

A small disappointment at the far end

But at the far end came yet another flyover, and at first I was a little disheartened. I saw that some kanchan trees and some bottlebrush trees had been planted very close together, one after the other. Seeing the white flowers of the kanchan right next to the leaves of the bottlebrush, I must have imagined that day that I had seen a new tree. My heart really did sink a little, because after an hour of walking, tired out, the thing I had wanted, the thing I had come hoping to see, did not exist. Still, there was nothing to despair about, I had enjoyed every bit of it. No, no, it is not over yet. There is still something left.

I had not seen wrong

On the way back, right beside the flyover, my eye suddenly fell on the very trees I had seen the other day. The tree looks like a bottlebrush, with white flowers hanging in clusters. I took photo after photo of it. Seeing me at it, a passer-by actually stopped to ask, brother, what is the name of that tree? I could not even tell him the name, which was a little embarrassing for me. But yes, at that moment the tree seemed enormously precious to me, because it kept reminding me that my guess had been right. I had not seen wrong that day.

Anyway, by the time I got near Police Plaza I was so tired that I had no choice but to get back on the circular bus and return to the Rampura bridge stop. I was heading home, but what can you do, on the way I had noticed some bandarlathi trees, Cassia grandis, near the stop. Bit by bit, very slowly, I made my way over to them, took a few photos and came home. As for the hero of this trip, the one I had gone to Hatirjheel for that day, I got his identity from our respected Jasim sir. I had given him some photos, and it was he who put a name to it: Callistemon pallidus (Bonpl.) DC.

The plants I met that day

• Palash, flame of the forest, Butea monosperma
• Shimul, red silk cotton tree, Bombax ceiba
• Kathbadam, tropical almond, Terminalia catappa
• Hijal, freshwater mangrove, Barringtonia acutangula
• Ranichura, Senna polyphylla
• Khejur, wild date palm, Phoenix sylvestris
• Baganbilash, bougainvillea, Bougainvillea spectabilis
• Shwet shimul, kapok, Ceiba pentandra
• Kamini, orange jasmine, Murraya paniculata
• Shwet raktakanchan, white orchid tree, Bauhinia variegata var. candida
• Debkanchan, purple orchid tree, Bauhinia purpurea
• Bottlebrush, Callistemon citrinus
• Kantamehedi, golden dewdrop, Duranta repens

The colours differ, but the flowers are built the same way, and the ring of yellow anthers in the middle gives away that these are all the same kind of plant. The plants never grow very tall. What they do instead is spread, carpeting a long stretch of ground so that it feels as if they have taken over a huge area.

My favourite, the pink one

The one I like most is the pink flower. Its scientific name is Zephyranthes rosea Lindl., and the name suits the look very well. Count the petals and there are exactly six, beautifully arranged. These plants are native to Peru and Colombia, yet they have settled in among us so comfortably that you would never guess they are not from here.

The white and the yellow

The white rain lily is the one I see for the longest stretch of the year, so I have a soft spot for it too. It goes by the name Zephyranthes candida (Lindl.) Herb. The one I see least is the yellow flower. The botanist Baker named it Zephyranthes citrina in 1882.

Leaves, bulbs and fruit

Rain lily leaves are long and narrow. As for the bulb, anyone who saw one would swear it was an onion. Oh, and the fruits deserve a mention as well. Each one looks like three little balls tied together with a bit of string. Not bad looking at all.

A small word of caution

When they bloom in a long row, they are a real pleasure to look at. But a little care is needed when you handle them. The plants contain some toxic compounds related to lycorine, and swallowing any part of them can cause trouble. So enjoy them with your eyes and keep them away from your mouth.

It likes a spot that is a little damp but never waterlogged, or the shade beneath some other tree. In the monsoon it turns up out of nowhere, without a sound, and within a few days it has grown big enough to catch everyone’s eye. The whole stem is green, and although it looks soft it is not really all that soft. The leaves are green too, hairy on the underside, with a toothed edge running from the middle of the leaf to its tip.

A flower head like broccoli

Even as you watch it grow, clusters of flowers open at the tip of the stem. Seen from a distance at this stage, the whole thing looks like a head of broccoli. The flowers are so small that unless you look closely you cannot tell that they are a bluish white. From the flowers come small, grainy fruits like pellets or marbles, which turn black as they ripen and then drop off on their own.

Here with the rains, gone before winter

I called it an amusing plant at the start because this whole cycle begins in the monsoon and is over before winter has properly arrived. In winter the leaves, and even the stem, rot away so completely that nothing is left but the tuber under the soil. For the rest of the year there is no trace of where the plant was or where it is, at least not until the next monsoon comes round. It is easy to mistake it for an annual because of this, but it is in fact a perennial. The tuber survives underground and sprouts afresh every monsoon. And even when it is out of human sight, it is said to keep earthworms away from the soil around it.

The plant can grow to about 2 metres at most. Hastikarna spreads by its tubers or roots and by seed. Its leaves contain flavonoids and other phenolic compounds.

A few traditional uses

Hastikarna has some uses in folk medicine as well. In the villages the root is traditionally used for ringworm, and the plant for joint pain and rheumatism. The juice of the leaves is applied to cuts, where it is said to slow the bleeding and act as an antiseptic. Now and then it is also used to dye cloth red.

Whatever else, it was a real pleasure to meet a plant like this. In a few days it will vanish again into some depth of the soil. But I hope we will meet again, some monsoon to come.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.

The expedition starts on the left as you walk in through the gate. Let me first write down the names of everything I saw that day, and then take them one by one.

What grows on the left

• Big trees: bakul (Spanish cherry), amloki (Indian gooseberry), tamarind, silver oak, nageshwar (Ceylon ironwood), pink cassia, sheora (sandpaper tree), mahogany, palash (flame of the forest), nagalingam (cannonball tree) and raj koroi
• Smaller trees: devkanchan (purple orchid tree), sajna (drumstick tree), radhachura (peacock flower), kurchi, gandharaj (gardenia), kamini (orange jasmine) and dadmordon (candle bush)
• Flowering shrubs and climbers: bougainvillea, honeysuckle, madhumanjari (Rangoon creeper), nil ghonta (blue trumpet vine), pentas, kolaboti (canna), cosmos, red and white ixora and dhutura (datura)
• Things you can eat or drink: papaya, banana, coffee and curry leaf

Along the wall, from devkanchan to tamarind

Standing against the left wall of Curzon Hall is the devkanchan, Bauhinia purpurea. It never grows very big, 4 to 12 metres at the most. The flowers are lovely, but the easiest way for me to recognise it is the leaf. Each leaf looks as if two leaves have been joined together at the base and left unjoined at the tip, so there is a deep notch running down from the midrib. That notch sets it apart from everything else around it.

Then comes the bakul. Who does not know the bakul tree. It is a tall, handsome, rounded tree, and scientists know it better as Mimusops elengi. You would not be wrong to compare a bakul flower to a tiny white water lily, but there is nothing to compare its scent to. And when the branches are full of little red fruits it is a fine sight.

Right after the bakul you meet the sajna, the drumstick tree. The scientist Lamarck gave it the name Moringa oleifera. There is no end to the virtues of sajna, and back in our village nearly every house has one. Because of its brittle trunk it does not usually get very big, though it can reach 10 metres. Since I am on the subject of the trunk, let me describe it a little more. It looks weak, a bit like cork, although the young stems are greenish. Many people could mistake its leaves for those of a koroi, but if you look closely the structure and arrangement of the leaflets are a little different. The flowers are different too, and in the right conditions they can come twice a year.

Oh, and there is one quality of sajna I cannot leave out. Its power to survive, its regeneration power, is so strong that if you plant a piece of branch barely two or three feet long in the ground, a new tree grows from it. A fun trait, is it not?

Next, the amloki, the Indian gooseberry, Phyllanthus emblica. Most of us know the fruit, but how many have seen the tree? No problem, you can see it right here. At first glance the leaves look compound, but they are actually small simple leaves set in two rows along slender twigs, so that from a distance each twig looks like a single feathery leaf, a bit like a two-sided saw. When the fruit ripens the leaves drop, but even then picking amloki from a tree this tall is no easy job.

The tamarind, Tamarindus indica, is rather more protective on this score and keeps its fruit hidden behind the leaves. And why not. Even with that massive trunk rising to 24 metres and the fruit covered in foliage, anyone walking past will at some point feel like throwing a stone to knock down a tamarind and eat it.

The one I know as pani jarul has the scientific name Lagerstroemia floribunda, though it goes by other names too. It belongs to the jarul family, so the flowers look much like those of the jarul, but the mix of white and pink in two or three shades makes it even more attractive. It is quite a big tree.

A little further in: palash, frangipani and the nageshwar rows

The palash is found a little further inside. Everyone knows the flower of this tree, famous as Butea monosperma, and who has not heard the songs written about palash. One way to recognise the tree is its leaf. Each leaf has three leaflets, with the middle one shaped a little differently from the two at the sides, and the leaflets themselves have a very pleasing shape, round and flat.

Beside it stands a pink frangipani, the kathgolap. Red and pink blend into a beautiful colour on it. If you want to know more, learn its scientific name, Plumeria rubra; that will be your best tool for searching.

A road runs through the middle of Curzon Hall, and both sides of it are lined with nageshwar, Mesua ferrea, clipped neatly into rounded shapes. The nageshwar flowers are beautiful, but what draws me more are the young leaves. I enjoy watching them change by stages. The new leaves come out red, then turn a paler red, and only in maturity become green. By the time they have turned green, fresh young leaves are already arriving again. And the tree seems to have fruit hanging on it all year round. Pick up two fresh seeds, knock one against the other, and they make a sharp clack that is very satisfying to hear.

The trees in between, from sheora to gagan shirish

So far I have only been describing the trees along the edges. Among them, here and there, stand some others, and one of these is the sheora, Streblus asper. It is a very well-known tree, but the thing it is famous for, ghosts, does not actually live in it. I recognise it by its rough leaves, spear-shaped and with a slightly crisp feel. From a distance it looks a little darker than the trees around it.

Mahogany is planted for its huge body; it gives very good timber. Being in the Meliaceae family, one side of each leaflet is a little narrower at the base, and the bark cracks, so there is no difficulty recognising it. Oh, and the fruits look like microphones, as if the tree were using them to listen in on everyone.

Before describing the nagalingam, the cannonball tree, Couroupita guianensis, let me describe the flower, because I doubt there is another flower like it. The structure is wonderful: red petals, and in the middle a great many anthers arranged beautifully. The leaves are glossy and handsome too. If you do not catch it in flower, you can still identify it by the fruits hanging from the trunk like cannonballs.

Nagalingam on both sides, and between them the kurchi. In proper terms it is Holarrhena antidysenterica, though these days it is usually called Holarrhena pubescens, and among its other Bangla names is hoimonti. Its flowers are a fine example of pure white. When it blooms the leaves drop, and the whole tree becomes nothing but captivating clusters of white flowers.

Right next to the kurchi stands an enormously tall raj koroi. I prefer its other name, gagan shirish, the shirish that reaches the sky. The scientific name is Albizia richardiana. It is one of the biggest trees on our Dhaka University campus. There are no branches at all lower down; the trunk goes a very long way up before a few leaves and branches appear. It is so tall that although it flowers and fruits every year, I have never yet had the good fortune to see them.

Now the right side

So far we have only looked at the left. Now let us see what is on the right. The first thing you notice there is a eucalyptus, a tree whose leaves smell of lemon, Eucalyptus citriodora. It looks as if someone has whitewashed its trunk. Tall and broad, it stands like a ghost in one corner of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department.

In front of that department is the boshontomonjori. Its trunk might remind you of a body with diseased bones, but when its pink flowers come, it becomes a lovely thing to look at.

At the far end of the department, though, the flowers you always notice are frangipani. White kathgolap hangs there in clusters, and its scientific name is Plumeria alba. Its leaf tips are pointed, while the frangipani we know as Plumeria obtusa has leaves with rounded tips.

In front of the Curzon Hall gate there is a palm we call the bottle palm, though in English that name usually belongs to a different palm; this one is the royal palm, Roystonea regia. At first I mistook it for an ordinary palm, but its trunk is a little different from that of a palm or a palmyra. These days it is being planted along roads more and more because it grows fast.

Four years later, in through the Biochemistry gate

In 2023 I went into Curzon Hall again, this time through the Biochemistry gate. Walk in that way and the first tree you meet is the shiuli, the night-flowering jasmine, and as you go on you come to a sonalu, the golden shower tree. Look towards the Biochemistry gate and you will find the monihar, a gagan shirish with a banyan growing on its body, and a cycas. Walk on towards the Botanical Garden and you will see an Indian almond, the kathbadam, a small radhachura and a chalmugra. Look towards the Chemistry department and there are nageshwar, pine trees and, standing alone in the middle, a silver oak.

Walk along the road between Chemistry and Biochemistry and beside the Chemistry wall you will find a sheora and a Grewia. In the round plaza edged with white plumbago, the shwetchita, which we call Shopno Chattar, there are a traveller’s palm, the panthapadap, a swarnachampa and a frangipani. A little further on, where the road splits towards Soil Science and Botany, look towards Soil and you will find a palmyra palm, a frangipani against the back wall of Biochemistry and another frangipani at the far end of Botany. If your eyesight is good, look past the Soil Science tea stall and you may spot a huge bohera tree as well. Start walking towards Botany and you pass a dracaena by the Chemistry windows, and then quite a few debdaru trees beside the Botany sign and along the boundary.

Ahead, if you look towards Applied Chemistry, you cannot miss a huge rain tree. Walk the path between Botany and Zoology and you meet, in turn, nageshwar, swarnachampa, debdaru, a lychee, and newly planted kurchi and small jarul, the phurush. If you look carefully you may even notice the word Botany written under the lychee tree in kata mehedi, the duranta hedge plant. Where the road divides towards Fazlul Huq Hall and Zoology, stand there and look towards the hall and you will see frangipani, rows of mahogany and nageshwar inside the gate, and lines of coconut and areca palms along the edge of the pond.

Look towards Zoology and you get, in order, a palash, a row of royal palms, yellow bells and at the end another huge rain tree. Against the Zoology wall there is a mulberry, and bougainvillea alongside a boshontomonjori. Look down and you will find pink crinum lilies, the sukhdarshan, and lankajoba, the sleeping hibiscus. And if you look properly you will realise that there is a big bakul tree at the far end of Zoology too. The expedition began with the bakul by the left wall, and it ends at a bakul as well. Even after writing down all these names I suspect I have missed half the trees. They will have to wait for the next walk.

It looked like a foxtail orchid, but I did not give it much thought. I had only ever seen foxtails in photographs, never with my own eyes, and how would an orchid as prized as the foxtail turn up in an ordinary village orchard? If I had seen it on many trees, or if there had been a house beside the orchard, I would have said that someone had planted it.

A little further on I thought I saw foxtail-like flowers on another tree. This time I could not let it pass. I had to look properly and settle whether these really were foxtails or whether I kept getting it wrong. I went on towards our destination with my eyes fixed on the orchards, but saw nothing more. When the work was done we came back by the same road, and now I was fully alert, determined to be sure. It really was a foxtail.

I needed photographs. Had I been alone I would have jumped down, but Amma and my sister were with me, so getting off was out of the question. I decided to come back another day for the pictures. As the flowers came into view again I told everyone in the auto to look, and what Amma said when she saw them surprised me a little. These flowers, she said, used to grow in plenty on the trees around our house, and you do not see them any more.

Back to Kansat on the fourth day of Eid

I had meant to go for the photographs the very next day, but one thing led to another and there was never a chance. On the fourth day of Eid, Marzuk, Zaman, Shamim bhaiya, Momin bhaiya and I went out for a ride on motorcycles. Marzuk and I rode with Shamim bhaiya, and Zaman with Abdul Momin bhaiya.

Because our route went through Kansat, I remembered the photographs. I asked bhaiya to stop the bike for a moment, I had pictures to take. Marzuk came along to see whose picture I was taking. And there, at last, I got to see the foxtail up close.

Its roots had spread all over the trunk, as if the plant had claimed the tree as its kingdom, and they reminded me of the veins that stand out on an old man’s hands. The leaves deserve a word of praise too. Light green, about half a forearm long, narrowing suddenly towards the end, with a clear groove running down the middle. Each one looks exactly like a sword without a hilt.

And the flowers were not so much flowers as garlands. It was as if someone had threaded more than a hundred blossoms one by one into a neat string, hung it on the trunk and walked away. Not one garland either, but eight of them hanging together all round the tree. The colour catches the eye too, pink with a faint tinge of blue. The older flowers sit at the base and the newer ones open towards the tip, which is to say the inflorescence is a raceme.

I could make out a light, sweet scent as well. The moment I saw them I badly wanted to take a few home, but then what would the others get to see if I carried them off? That thought stopped me, and I left them where they were.

Not a parasite, an epiphyte

When we got home after the ride I showed the photographs to Shamim bhaiya, and he said almost exactly what Amma had said. So that is what you went to photograph, he said, those are just parasites. We played with them so much as children. They grew in the orchards all around, especially the one behind your house, where almost every mango tree had these flowers on it. They looked so pretty, but you do not find them now. For a moment I thought of telling him that a foxtail is not a parasite but an epiphyte. I never got the chance. Both parasites and epiphytes grow on another plant, a host, but a parasite harms its host and an epiphyte does no harm at all.

Thinking it over, I realised that I used to go to that orchard behind our house often enough, to play cricket or to collect fallen mangoes, yet I cannot remember ever seeing these flowers. Bhaiya’s words left me a little sad. Where is that old environment now? Trees are being cut down for houses, and everything is filling up with dust. We have made such a mess of our surroundings that we ourselves struggle to live in them, so how are sensitive plants and insects like these supposed to survive?

Getting to know the foxtail

Once home, I set about collecting information on the foxtail. The flower has no Bangla name of its own, so the English name has simply been carried over as foxtail, or just orchid for short, and it gets that name because it looks a little like a fox’s tail. The scientific name is Rhynchostylis retusa, a member of the family Orchidaceae. It grows best on the trunks of large trees in damp, shady places, and it is not host specific, meaning it can grow on almost any tree. Direct sunlight harms it.

It grows naturally in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Myanmar and China. Here it is found more or less everywhere, but most plentifully in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and other hilly areas. It usually flowers from May through June and July. The flowers hold nectar, so all sorts of insects, birds and bees keep coming and going around them, and carpenter bees in particular are known as the foxtail’s pollinators.

Compared with other plants the foxtail grows very slowly. Seeing a new seedling come up from seed is a matter of luck, because in most cases the seed dies before it ever becomes a seedling. It can be propagated by hand, though. Young offshoots that sprout from the base of a plant, once they have a few roots of their own, can be separated and planted elsewhere, and a new plant grows there.

The kopou phool of Assam

The foxtail grows in abundance in Assam in India, where many people plant it to beautify their homes. But it is not only about beauty there, the flower has a special role to play. In Assamese it is called kopou phool, and it is the state flower of Assam. When the new year arrives, during Bohag Bihu, Assamese women wear it in their hair. There, the foxtail is a symbol of love.

The foxtail has a few traditional medicinal uses as well. In folk medicine the fresh plant is used as an emollient and for rheumatic pain, and in the Malabar region preparations made from it are traditionally used for asthma, muscle cramps, dizziness and palpitations.

Before it is gone

With all these qualities, the foxtail is today under threat from environmental pollution and from unscrupulous traders. If something is not done soon, it may not be long before it disappears from among us altogether. Yes, I admit that growing it at home takes a bit of extra care: it needs watering on time and in the right amount, it needs feeding, and without that it dies. But for a plant this beautiful that is not too much trouble. That much we can surely do.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.

We walked around for a while, and he broke a branch off a plant by the roadside and brought it back. When I asked to see it he said I could look, but on no account was I to tear a leaf; look quietly and hand it back. The moment I touched a leaf he snapped at me that he had not said it for nothing, he had forbidden it because the plant was poisonous. At the word poisonous I let go at once and we walked home together. The woman was still sitting there. As soon as he handed her the branch she tore off a leaf, and white sap began to ooze out of the break. That sap she rubbed on her foot. Something had bitten her the night before, she said, and the spot had swollen up red and was throbbing. This, she said, would set it right quickly.

Meeting it properly at university

It was at university that I was properly introduced to akondo, the crown flower, and realised that the akunda of that day was this very plant. You might mistake other plants, but anyone who has seen akondo once is unlikely to forget it or confuse it. Its leaves, and especially its flowers, are quite unlike those of other plants. The leaves are not fully green but have a greyish white cast, with fine hairs all over. In the flower the five stamens are fused together into something like a crown, and the pale purple tinge gives it a regal look you rarely see in any other plant. That is why it is called the crown flower in English.

Oh, I have not introduced it properly. Its scientific name is Calotropis gigantea. For a long time my rule of thumb was that milky latex plus poisonous meant Euphorbiaceae, but with akondo that shortcut failed me. The first family name I learnt for it was Asclepiadaceae; the plants of that group usually carry a milky latex, which is why their other common name is milkweed. Only now, all this time later, have I learnt that akondo actually belongs to the family Apocynaceae, in the subfamily Asclepiadoideae.

Its home is the warm regions of India, Pakistan, Malaysia, China, Cambodia, Nepal and Sri Lanka. That is why you usually see it on raised ground by the roadside or in house yards, places where water does not collect and the air stays dry. In our country it grows wild almost anywhere, but anyone who wants to can raise it from cuttings or from seed. Strictly it should not be called a tree at all; it is a shrub, though these days we call every plant a tree. It usually grows 2 to 3 metres tall, and taller in some places.

The old accomplice by the school wall

Until recently I believed no one could easily forget an akondo plant, and then I proved myself wrong when I went home to the village for the Eid holidays after Ramadan. As every year, our batch from Shibganj Government Model High School had its iftar. For one reason or another I had never managed to attend, but this year, by the grace of Allah, I was there. The moment I entered the Model school field I was stunned to see an akondo. How could I not be? For six whole years I had put my foot on its shoulder to climb the school wall and fetch cricket balls. I had slipped out past it instead of through the main gate because it was the shortcut to Kalupur. It was the accomplice of everyone who ever skipped school, and its services are still needed today. And that plant, it turned out, was an akondo. How had it grown so huge? How had I never noticed these lovely flowers? I kept asking myself.

I wanted to take some photographs of that plant and all its memories right then, but I could not. Lately a fear of criticism has settled on me, the worry about what people will say if they see me taking pictures. So I decided to come back another time. One day after Eid I went to the Model school field. Just seeing the plant made me happy; it was covered in flowers and fruit. With age its trunk had come to look like the trunk of a bel tree.

Ever since I joined university I had badly wanted to see the fruit of akondo, and the wish had never been granted. Only a few days earlier I had told Rasif how much I wanted to see one. It still amazes me that this long-held wish was granted right here. The fruit looks exactly like a little boat, or a half moon. Inside, the brown seeds sit in a beautiful pattern, one arranged neatly over the next. At the end of each seed is a tuft of long silky floss, rather like the kash flowers that drift off a kash field. In the Indian subcontinent this floss from the seeds is used to stuff pillows as a substitute for silk cotton.

My brother Zaman was with me, so I asked him to pick a fruit and make a short video. We did make the video, but with an unripe fruit; I simply could not tell which were ripe and which were not. I kept warning him about the poisonous sap, because if he had an accident, the hobby would turn into a disaster. I never noticed when a crowd of boys and girls gathered round us. Once I did, there was nothing for it but to turn around quietly and walk out of the field.

Looking for the white akondo

I was delighted to have seen the fruit at last, but another small wish kept peeping out from a corner of my mind: the white akondo. I had heard there was a white one, and I had even seen it, though not up close, only from a bus. We had gone to Sylhet on our study tour, and in several places along the way I thought I saw white akondo growing by the road. To check that I was not imagining it, I asked Shahidul whether he could see white akondo too. He said nothing at first, but then agreed with me. I cannot describe the state I was in. All I wanted was to get off the bus and take some pictures. There was nothing I could do, though. At one point I thought of asking the sirs to stop the bus so I could photograph a white akondo, but how could anyone ask that? Still my mind would not settle, so I asked Shamim whether we could possibly ask the sirs to stop. He told me it would be better not to do anything of the sort, and that left the wish to see white akondo up close exactly that, a wish.

That wish too was granted this time. I had gone alone to my maternal uncle’s house on an errand. The plan was to go, meet everyone, finish the job and come back. Everything went to plan, and I was heading home, sitting in the front seat of an auto, enjoying the roadside and thinking about all sorts of things. Suddenly it struck me that the plant by the road was not an ordinary akondo but a white one. The afternoon sun was falling on it, so I might have been wrong. I took the risk and got off the auto. We had come some way past it by then, so I had to walk back. As I walked I kept thinking that if it was not what I thought, getting off would have been for nothing. But it was not for nothing. It was white akondo.

That day I was freed from the habit of staring at every roadside akondo and wondering whether it was the white one. I looked at the plant carefully. The only difference from the ordinary akondo is the colour of the flower: the ordinary one is pale purplish blue, and this one is entirely white. I could see no other outward difference. If only I had some kind of inner vision, I might have stood there and worked out whether there was any difference inside as well. Imagination is imagination, but I had met both the akondo fruit and the white akondo in one go, and it felt very good.

The chemistry inside, and the uses back home

It did not end there. Back home I started looking up what sort of compounds the plant holds. The leaves, stems and roots have been found to contain several cardiac glycosides such as calotropin, calotoxin, calactin and uscharin, triterpenoids such as lupeol, amyrin, taraxerol and sitosterol, and a toxic compound called gigantin. The root bark holds an unusual amino acid called giganticine, which makes the plant unpalatable to insects. Many of these compounds are poisonous, which is exactly why people are so careful around the sap.

Even so, in the villages the leaves, sap and roots of akondo are traditionally used for several things. Old herbal books mention its use for insect stings, skin complaints such as ringworm, scabies and eczema, old sores, a cold that has settled in the chest, and stomach pain that comes with loose motions. The sap that elderly woman rubbed on her foot belongs to the same tradition. One thing to remember: the sap can harm the eyes and is harmful if swallowed, so it is wise to be careful when handling the plant.

Let me end with one thought. Human wants never end. You want one thing and you get it, then you want another, and when you get that one, another, and another, and it goes on like that until death. I am no exception. A new wish has sprung up to see the other species of akondo, Calotropis procera. I know the chances of finding it in our country are very slim, but the wish stays, and I walk on in the hope that one day, God willing, I will see it. Perhaps the next time an akondo catches my eye by the roadside I will stand staring at it again, trying to work out whether it is Calotropis gigantea or Calotropis procera.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.

A few days later, walking past Mokarram Bhaban, I noticed the same flowers inside the pharmacy garden. Once again they were too far in for me to see the plant properly, but I made a plan to come back some day and have a good look.

The plant I had taken for bamboo

For quite a while I did not meet those dazzling flowers again. When I finally did, it was in a place that genuinely surprised me: the medicinal garden of our own department. The plants I had been passing for ages, thinking they were some bamboo bonsai or some other kind of bamboo, were carrying this very flower. I stood there a long time trying to work out whether this was a separate plant or really their flower.

At last I could see it up close. It is a herb with a single stem rising from under the ground, no branches at all, and the leaves wrap around the stem, each overlapping the one below. The leaves are a slightly dark green and lanceolate in shape. At the tip of the stem hangs a long cluster of flowers, white with a touch of red. They are lovely, with a single petal-like labellum and an anther dangling in front of it. The inflorescence is a raceme. I took my photos, confident that since I had found it on campus, the name would not take much effort.

The name I found, and the name that was right

It did not take long, but the answer surprised me. The first name I came across was choto elach, the small cardamom. The flower of the cardamom we put in our cooking, growing right there in the department. That is exactly why I keep thinking everyone should keep a small garden. From it you would get vegetables, fruit, all kinds of spices, and along with them peace of mind, beauty and a quiet satisfaction.

Then I dug a little deeper and the picture changed. The name was close, but this is not the cardamom of our kitchens. This plant is Alpinia calcarata, and the small cardamom we cook with comes from Elettaria cardamomum. Both belong to the ginger family, Zingiberaceae, so they are close relatives, but not the same plant. Because the flower looks rather like a snapdragon, it is called snap ginger. It is native to India, which gives it another name, Indian ginger. Why some people call it cardamom ginger is a story for another day.

Like ginger, it grows from a rhizome under the soil. It is a perennial herb that lives for several years, and its rhizome can be used much like ginger. It has 48 chromosomes, if you like that sort of detail. Had it been in my own garden I would have dug up the rhizome to look at it and photograph it. But it is not mine, and if someone caught me digging in the department garden that would be the end of me. So I have still not seen that rhizome with my own eyes, and I do not know whether I ever will.

What the rhizome holds

The rhizome, the flowers and the roots carry a number of volatile oils, the main ones being 1,8-cineole, camphene, pinene, camphor, borneol and methyl cinnamate. Studies have also reported compounds such as quercetin and vanillic acid, along with some terpenes.

Most of the plant’s traditional use centres on the rhizome. It is traditionally used for sore throat, a broken voice, cough, asthma, rheumatic pain, fever and digestive upsets. In India, though not here, the young shoots are also cooked and eaten.

One thing I have decided, though. From now on, when a cardamom pod gets crushed under my teeth in the middle of a meal, I will not glare at it. I will think of its beautiful cousin in the department garden and set it aside with due respect.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.

On the way we noticed a small herbal garden. We tried to peep in, but somehow a guard spotted us and told us off, so we kept walking along its edge instead. Suddenly there was a whole set of new trees in front of us. One of them was ritha, the soapberry, Sapindus saponaria.

Mahogany or ritha?

The moment I saw it I blurted out to Shamim, look, a mahogany tree, somebody must have hung the ritha nameplate on it by mistake. Then I started doubting my own words. Honestly, I was confused about whether the plate was wrong or I was. Shamim and I looked at the tree for a good while, and after looking, his vote went to ritha. In my heart my vote went to ritha too, but I said mahogany anyway. I knew that if I said mahogany, the two of us would end up arguing, and something useful would come out of it.

The case for each side

I told him why it looked like a mahogany to me. The nameplate put ritha in the family Sapindaceae, but the leaflets were slightly lopsided at the base, which is one of the typical features of the mahogany family, Meliaceae. On top of that, the leaves were pinnately compound, just like a mahogany’s.

Shamim partly agreed with me, but then he pointed out that mahogany leaflets do not end in such sharp tips, and that mahogany leaves are a dark green, while not a single leaf on this tree was dark, all of them light green. I accepted his point, looked at the ritha a little longer and more carefully, and we moved on.

How much longer with classical taxonomy?

But to be honest, recognising trees this way is hard work. Mixing one up with another is nothing unusual. How much longer can we go on with classical taxonomy alone? It would be wonderful if gene testing were cheap and easy. Then we could identify everything around us without any trouble or confusion.

The soap tree

Anyway, the English name of ritha is Indian soap, and the more common one is soapberry. The name surprised me a little, because it simply means soap. But the name is well earned. Rub the fruit in water and it lathers like soap, and in our part of the world people have long used that lather to wash clothes and hair. So now I know its name, its family and the story behind the soap. And still, I feel I do not really know ritha.

One day I told a friend that there was a beautiful smell around his temple and that I loved it. He said, that is dhoop, incense. Since then the name has stayed with me. The scent is not one you forget either. It is so dear to me that even today, whenever I see smoke somewhere, a part of me hopes that someone has lit dhoop. Sometimes the hope comes true, and sometimes it gets put away for another day.

Not only in temples

I used to think incense was burnt only in Hindu temples. That idea broke at a relative’s house. I had barely stepped in when the smell of dhoop reached me, so I asked him why he had lit incense. He said the smoke was useful for all sorts of things, and that it drove the mosquitoes away. I sat there for a long while that day, a little drunk on the smoke.

Shamim’s call at Baldha Garden

A while ago I got the chance to visit Baldha Garden with Udbhid Chattar, a group I follow on social media. Chance is the wrong word, it was good luck, because I had been telling Shahidul for quite a while that we should go to Baldha. Of the garden’s two parts, the one called Psyche is not open to everyone, but thanks to the group we got in. It is full of trees, familiar and unfamiliar. That walk deserves its own post, so I will keep it short here.

We were all wandering at the far end of Psyche when Shamim called out. I went over and found him sitting under a tree, peering at something. The moment I reached him he asked, have you seen dhoop? Look, this is the dhoop tree. I was stunned. What did a dhoop tree mean, was that smoke really made from this tree? Did this tree have anything at all to do with incense? I did not know, and neither did Shamim.

Turning these thoughts over, I looked at the tree again. It was tall and broad, with no branches at all on the lower part, as if someone had planted an electric pole there and stuck a great mass of leaves on top. The trunk was very smooth and earthy in colour, you could call it grey. The leaves high up looked a lot like garjan leaves, which is exactly why I had first mistaken this dhoop tree for a garjan. The label gave the scientific name as Canarium resiniferum Bruce ex King, in the family Burseraceae. I wrote both down.

Back home, a little searching showed that our suspicion was right. This tree and the incense in the temple are closely related. A kind of resin oozes from the trunk, and once it is dried, that is what is burnt in temples as dhoop.

Meeting it again at Mirpur

I met dhoop again in section 57 of the Mirpur Botanical Garden, and honestly, that is where I got to know the tree properly. Many dhoop trees stand there planted in a neat row. I learnt there that the trunk carries long vertical marks. The leaves are a little stiff, glossy on top but noticeably different underneath, where they are covered in fine hairs.

The name gave me some trouble, though. The family was the same, Burseraceae, but the scientific name on the plate was Canarium zeylanicum (Retz.) Blume. Yet the tree at Baldha and the trees here looked almost exactly alike. I have since learnt that Canarium zeylanicum is a Sri Lankan species, separate from Canarium resiniferum, so one of the two labels probably deserves a second look.

Getting to know the dhoop tree

In Bangladesh the tree grows wild in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and so it has a few local names there: bari rata, dhonia rata and pairang. It is not only ours either. It grows naturally in neighbouring India, in Myanmar and in China as well.

Studies have reported a number of terpene compounds in its resin and oleoresin, among them limonene, alpha-pinene and alpha- and beta-amyrin, while the bark and wood have yielded phellandrene and sterols such as sitosterol. The timber is useful too, and goes into veneer and plywood. The fruit and seeds are a source of good oil, and in many countries the fruits are eaten.

I have a strong wish to plant a dhoop tree beside my own house. If it grows up and keeps giving me resin, I will dry it all day, burn it at night, and sleep without a care in the world.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.

Then one day I saw that in front of the gate of the Registrar Building, where the lawn between the two roads comes to an end, some very beautiful flowers had opened. White flowers, with a beauty all their own. The petals spread out around them in such a way that they looked like an octopus with its arms stretched in every direction, or a spider standing on its eight legs. And the yellow stamens poked out between those spread petals.

Octopus or spider

The plant holding these flowers up high looks a little like ghritakumari, the aloe vera (Aloe vera), though the two plants differ in many ways. Its leaves are striking too. I had seen leaves of this kind before, but never this big. They are like long, thick bamboo leaves, only enormous, smooth and a glossy, oily green. When I tried to measure one with my hand, the hand turned out to be the smaller of the two. After looking for a long while I took a photo and set off for class again. On the way I saw the same plant flowering in several other places, and it was lovely to see.

As I walked it occurred to me that I had seen a plant with leaves like these in front of the Zoology Department as well. I could go there and spend a little more time thinking about the flowers. When I got there I found the same kind of leaves, but the flowers had not fully come yet, only buds. And the buds were not white but a reddish, magenta colour. Now what? Were these two different coloured flowers of the same plant, or two different species? I was in real trouble now. I did not even know the name, and on top of that came this problem. I did not think about it any further at the time.

A name found in a book

Some days later, turning the pages of a book, I came across the flower’s identity. The name given was sukhdarshan, which roughly means a sight that brings happiness. Whether seeing the flower actually brings happiness I cannot say, but the name is a beautiful one. Another name is boro kanur. The scientific name is Crinum asiaticum. The English names matched my imagination, spider lily and giant crinum lily, but a third English name worried me a little. It was poison bulb. So was the body of this plant poisonous?

The day before, I had spent a long time handling the leaves, and I was a little frightened about what might happen now. The sap could have caused all kinds of burning and irritation on the skin, and had I eaten any it could have upset the stomach, brought on vomiting straight away, stomach pain, even diarrhoea. Thank goodness I had not tasted it, I thought, and breathed a sigh of relief. Someone who unknowingly uses too much of it can even end up paralysed. Shamim always says, if you see something you do not recognise, do not put it in your mouth. Well, listening to him saved me this time.

A lily that is not a lily

Seeing sukhdarshan listed as a member of the family Amaryllidaceae made me doubt things for a moment. Bulb plants are usually members of Liliaceae, so what family was this book talking about? I started searching through a lot of things to get the facts right. Later I learnt that although it is called a spider lily, it is not a true lily at all. It looks a little like a lily, so the name is a figurative one.

The pink beauty at TSC

Then one day I had gone to TSC for some errand or other. I was heading for the cafeteria, and as I came in through the main gate my eye fell on a flower to the right. For a moment I wondered whether this was the pink sukhdarshan I had been waiting on for so long in front of Zoology. Good, I thought, found it at last. I took a photo of the beauty. But I noticed something else: both its flowers and its leaves were bigger than the white one’s, the leaves three or four times longer than the body of the plant. Everything else, though, was exactly the same.

In the end I understood that these two are in fact separate species. This one is the red spider lily, lal sukhdarshan, with the scientific name Crinum × amabile. And yes, it is a hybrid. I have grown rather fond of both of them.

Poison and medicine

Anyway, sukhdarshan contains many important compounds. Its rhizome holds a number of alkaloids such as lycorine, crinine, crinamine and haemanthamine. The bulb contains hippeastrine, the leaves cherylline, and the seeds crinamine and lycorine.

The more surprising thing is that, poisonous as it is, sukhdarshan has many uses in folk medicine. I had often heard of using a thorn to remove a thorn, but this was the first time I had seen a poisonous plant used as medicine. In traditional practice the juice of its leaves is used for pain in the nose and ears. It is also traditionally used by people who pass too little urine, and the leaves are applied to infections at the base of the nails. But since it is poisonous, I for one would not take the risk of trying treatments like these without experience.

Apart from all that, I have come to like the scent of sukhdarshan. Let it keep a little of its poison; if I had a plant like this in a garden, I could raise new seedlings from the bulbs every year. And since sukhdarshan is a perennial, I hope that from one plant will come a great deal of happiness.

The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.