Delhiwale: Tree of the poets

How to look for kadamb ka ped in this park? The place is so huge, with too many trees

How to look for kadamb ka ped in this park? The place is so huge, with too many trees.

Akshay, who often travels from distant Gurugram to Lodhi Garden.

An Instagram post by @delhitrees recently shared photos of kadamb trees in bloom here. The location hint in the caption was poetic, not practical: “Tucked away within the historic expanse of Lodhi Garden lies a quiet grove of more than a dozen mature kadamb trees, many of them in bloom. The delicate, creamy, spherical flowers release a sweet fragrance that lingers in the damp monsoon air…”

So the search starts on this muggy monsoon evening. From one corner of the park to another, eyes keep moving upwards, looking for the flowers seen in the photos. A tree near the Sheesh Gumbad looks promising, but turns out to be the wrong one. Another beside the sloping ground where people play football has somewhat similar leaves but no flowers. Paths are retraced, trees examined from different angles. The grove remains elusive.

The search finally succeeds by matching the trees and benches visible in the Instagram photos. Near the rose garden, beyond a stretch of overgrown grass, stands the cluster of kadamb trees. On this cloudy evening, some of the round flower heads are already browning as the rainy season advances. Some are raw green, perhaps just starting to bloom. Bristling with tiny buds, the flower heads bear a resemblance to the coronavirus cells that became so familiar during the pandemic.

Once found, kadamb is easy to recognise. Its branches jut out at right angles from the trunk, the bark marked by vertical cracks. The flower heads shoot out in the later monsoon months of August and September.

Apart from Lodhi Garden, Kadamb trees grow in several public parks in Delhi, including the memorial ghats beside the Yamuna. This river that flows past our city also flows by Vrindavan, the landscape of Bhagwan Krishna, with whom the river and the kadamb tree are closely associated. The connection finds a sweet expression in Subhadra Kumari Chauhan’s poem Yeh Kadamb Ka Ped, in which a child wishes that a kadamb tree stood beside the Yamuna so he could climb it, and become the playful little Krishna. The poem begins:

Yeh kadamb ka ped agar maa hota Yamuna teere,Mein bhi uspar baith Kanhaya banta dheere-dheere.

The wish to be close to Krishna, in whatever form, runs deeper in the poetry of Raskhan. In one of his compositions, the Bhakti poet wishes to live among the cowherds of Gokul if born human, among Nanda’s herd if born a cow, and on Govardhan if born a stone. As a bird, he asks for just one thing: to build his nest on a kadamb tree beside the Yamuna.

And now, under these flowering kadambs stands the gracious Akshay, who often travels from distant Gurugram to Lodhi Garden, sometimes alone and sometimes with friends. See photo.