When Bengaluru turns pink, white, yellow and green

It is that time of the year again when Bengaluru emerges from its shadow of being the “IT capital” and traces its roots back to the glorious ‘Garden City’ tag. Bursts of pink, yellow, and white along what is left of the city’s once famed green cover make it “Instagrammable” for reasons beyond its pubs, restaurants and skyscrapers.

It is that time of the year again when Bengaluru emerges from its shadow of being the “IT capital” and traces its roots back to the glorious ‘Garden City’ tag. Bursts of pink, yellow, and white along what is left of the city’s once famed green cover make it “Instagrammable” for reasons beyond its pubs, restaurants and skyscrapers.

Among the flood of social media posts dedicated to the flowering trees is one by a popular digital content creator from the city who, while clicking photos of the luscious flowers, wonders, “Cherry Blossoms? Oh no, that’s in Japan,” before he goes on to just refer to the pink hues and continue enjoying them.

So where do these picture-perfect trees come from, and how do they add to the character of Bengaluru’s landscape?

“Bengaluru has an especially high tree biodiversity compared to many large cities of the world, as our research has shown. Some of the most spectacular flowering trees are the yellow and pink Tabebuias, Jacaranda, rain tree, copper pod, Gulmohar, African tulip, Pride of India, badminton ball tree, sampige, plumeria — but there are so many more, depending on which parts of the city you love to visit,” said Harini Nagendra, Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, whose book Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future documents them.

Which of these are native to the city? Ms. Nagendra says some commonly found native species are neem, honge, tamarind, jackfruit, mango, peepal, banyan, and coconut, but it depends on what one defines as native.

“For instance, the tamarind, which we consider such an integral part of Indian cooking and biodiversity, is not native to India; it came from central Africa many centuries back, probably brought by Arab traders. Coconut, even more indisputably part of the Bengaluru treescape, is also not native if you dig deep into history. It may have been introduced to the broad Indian Ocean region as far back as two thousand years in the past, first going to Sri Lanka and the Lakshwadeep islands, and then making it to mainland south India,” she explained.

Ganesan  Rengaian, Senior Fellow, SM Sehgal Foundation Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), said almost all trees in the city, other than Pongamia, are from other parts of the world or India.