There were quite a few of us that day. Zaman, Shamim, Meheran and I, four of us in all, were wandering through section 57 of the Mirpur Botanical Garden. We kept running into trees old and new, familiar and unfamiliar. We walked along chatting and looking at them, and it felt good.
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.
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