How to make friends with the trees around you Premium

Roopa Pai’s fascination for trees was first kindled at a tree walk she went on about two decades ago. “My father would tell me the names of flowering trees like jacaranda and gulmohar when I was little, so I knew some things. But true appreciation only came when I was much older after living in other cities and countries,” says Pai, the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a history and heritage walks and tours company.

Roopa Pai’s fascination for trees was first kindled at a tree walk she went on about two decades ago. “My father would tell me the names of flowering trees like jacaranda and gulmohar when I was little, so I knew some things. But true appreciation only came when I was much older after living in other cities and countries,” says Pai, the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a history and heritage walks and tours company.

In 2005, a little after she and her husband, Arun, started Bangalore Walks, she met the late Vijay Thiruvady, dendrophile, raconteur and chronicler of the city’s green heritage. He took her for a walk in Lal Bagh, remembers Pai, who went along, not expecting anything particularly life-changing. “History and heritage have been a passion, but I somehow never thought of trees as heritage,” she says. “Art, handicraft, dance, textiles…all that, yes. But not trees.”

But the passion with which Thiruvady spoke about trees changed something in her. “He spoke about them as if they were truly sentient beings, as if they were alive and spoke to him,” she recalls. “And he knew them intimately because he had walked the same paths in Lal Bagh every day, every morning, for years and years.”

After this walk she began looking at trees differently. “It brought a different dimension to the whole thing,” says Pai, the author of Let’s Talk About Trees, recently released by Juggernaut Books, part of the Indian Pitta Kids imprint published in partnership with WWF-India. “As you drive around the city, you notice something special about these trees, and they truly become your friends,” she says.

Let’s Talk About Trees, a charming book beautifully illustrated by Canada-based artist Barkha Lohia delves into multiple aspects of what Pai calls “the amazing, extraordinary Treeverse (the universe of trees).”

Pai starts the book by taking the reader into the primordial world in which the first tree-like plants burst onto the scene — they’ve been around for over 300 million years, pre-dating and outliving dinosaurs, she writes — before discussing the reasons why it is important to know about them.

“It is only when you know something that you can begin to love it,” she writes, adding that once you love a tree, it will stop being something that simply exists and becomes something that lives not only outside of you but inside you. “You will feel deeply for every tree and want to celebrate each one’s awesomeness. And that is a win, for you will never be lonely—or bored—as long as you have trees you love around you.”