New Central Vista plantation to be 'as close' to the original Lutyens’ designs

It will also rectify the errors that the city’s horticulture departments have made over the years.

While designing the new Central Vista, the focus of plantation will be to “keep it as close to the original Lutyens’ Delhi” plan, designers and architects working on the project said.

The government is proposing to redevelop the Central Vista by constructing a new Parliament house, a residential complex that will house the Prime Minister and the Vice President, besides several new office buildings.(HT Archive)

Environmentalist and author Pradip Krishen, who is advising the designers in the Central Vista redevelopment project, said that the new plantation scheme has been designed to replicate the British design for the Capital in 1912. It will also rectify the errors that the city’s horticulture departments have made over the years.

Krishen said that initially only 13 tree species were chosen to line the avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi; the number was subsequently increased to 16.

“The criteria were that the shape and the size of the trees chosen for that particular avenue should be just right in order to frame the feature they were facing. Three things were kept in mind: they had to be the right size, they had to be evergreen and they should not be common. That was the reason why species that the Mughals preferred, such as mango, or shisham did not find space in the avenue scheme,” Krishen explained.

Lutyens’s plan accounted for around 450 trees in all, of which at least 385 were rai-jamun trees. Today, however, there are at least 3,200 large trees (4,000 if the smaller ones and shrubs are included). Around 1,080 are rai-jamun trees, a spokesperson for HCP Design Planning and Management Private Limited (HCP), the firm in charge of the project design said. Of these, 21 are being transplanted to make space for amenities like toilets for the public, the spokesperson added.

To be sure, trees of this size can’t usually be successfully replanted.

Historians said that Lutyens initially designed this part of Delhi with all streets crossing at right angles. However, this was later tweaked, taking into account the dusty Delhi weather. Thus, the trees, hedges, even roundabouts were carefully designed as barriers to seasonal dust storms.

Krishen said that as an advisor to the Central Vista project, he has tried to retain the original patterns of Lutyens’s design as much as possible. He said that the new design might also rectify the plantation done by the Central Public Works Department and the New Delhi Municipal Council over the years.

For instance, there was an original grid plan for the plantation of jamun trees. The design, which was called the “diamond grid”, only involved around 385 jamun trees, all planted in a diamond-like pattern.

“If you look at aerial images, the pattern is very interesting. It’s like small Xs drawn all over and at each end of the X a jamun tree was planted, and the rest of the space was left empty. But the CPWD in their course of plantation completely lost track of this pattern, mainly because they did not understand the original design,” Krishen said.

The spaces left empty by the original gardeners to create that pattern, was filled in by planting new jamun trees.

But no one wanted to go back to that plan entirely or immediately because “that would mean getting rid of a huge number of jamun trees and nobody wanted that,” he added.

Krishen said that it was finally decided to have a “long-term replacement strategy”.

“We decided to adopt a scheme with a validity of at least 30 years, which means that in the future when a tree dies, it will not be replaced by a jamun tree so that a khali (empty space) remains khali and a bhara (occupied space) remains bhara, or will be replaced by a tree of another species,” Krishen said.

Project documents shows that 26 old jamun trees will be affected during constructions. These nearly 100-year-old trees, planted around 1921, are to be transplanted and not felled, but experts fear that they might not survive the transplantation.

Based on documents and aerial photographs dating back to the 1920s,HCP was able to recreate Lutyens’ tree plan along the avenue: a serrated grid of trees, comprising primarily of rai-jamun trees that flanked either side of the Central Vista Avenue and pines, maulsari and bistendu trees that were to cluster around what is now Vijay Chowk. The trees along the avenue criss-crossed over the waterways providing ample sitting space under the shade.

HCP’s proposal, based on advice from horticultural experts Kishen (based in Delhi) and Dr Prabhakar Rao (based in Bengaluru), aims to create a “tree plan” that will be realized over the next two to three decades as these trees reach their natural end.

“The draft plan for the plantation at Central Vista Avenue is likely to be a more populated criss-cross grid, similar to Lutyens’ pattern, which aims to preserve as many of these trees as possible without needing to transplant them,” the HCP spokesperson added.

“ Many of the jamun trees are already at the end of their life cycles and are likely to die over the next two decades. So when they die, what should come up in that space? Should it be left alone? We’re trying to come up with a planting plan based on Lutyens’ cross pattern,” the spokesperson said

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