Many of you have been to Curzon Hall. You have looked at the red building, walked round it and come home. A botany student has a problem there. My eyes go to the trees beside the building more than to the building itself, and once I have started looking at trees I cannot rest until I have made a list. One day in 2019 I decided to get to know the trees of Curzon Hall one at a time. I called it the Curzon Hall expedition.
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.
Leave a Reply