Song of the spring

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Rajnish Wattas

Spring is a many-splendoured season in Chandigarh. The trees are painted with a splash of pink, lilac, red and myriad others colours stolen from the palette of nature’s brush. The city avenues undergo a Cinderella-like transformation. The hitherto plain-looking trees change overnight into vistas of blossoms all the way. The beauty of the treescapes in the city is a round-the-year symphony changing with the seasons.

As originally envisaged by Dr M S Randhawa and Le Corbusier, the fast-moving traffic roads had evergreen trees and each Sector was marked by the distinct colour of its tree blossoms, along the inner shopping streets. Sector 16, once upon a time, was a ‘dreamscape’ of yellow blossoms of amaltas trees. And Sectors 19 and 27 were laden with pink cassias and mauve-coloured panorama of lagerstroemias. Alas all that is gone now, replaced by evergreen trees!

If one visits the Leisure Valley, it has an Arcadian beauty adorned by myriad flowering trees. The curtain-raisers of this concert are the semul trees. Tall, strapping with branches jutting out from the stem, they first shed off all leaves in the cold of January and then in early February don big bouquets of crimson coloured flowers. The flowering is so profuse that the ground beneath gets littered with them. As one walks along the serpentine zigzagging path in the Valley —one notices clumps of magnificent jacrandas dressed up in lilac-coloured blossoms lighting up the adjoining dark, brooding foliage. Dotting them is the bright plumage of hoopoes, one of the most people-friendly birds.

But the most spectacular display is by the tecoma trees. They first shed off their dusty small leaves and then metamorphose into radiant yellow bunches of flowers. As the rays of sun fall on their magical splendour, they are ablaze like yellow orbs.

A peculiar but aesthetic experience of spring is the profuse leaf-shedding and change of foliage on trees like pilkhan and kusum; that undergo heavy leaf-fall during March. With the gentle nudge of a breeze — the old and tired, brown, russet and golden leaves are ready to say goodbye to these trees. They fall from the branches to lazily float down below to their final resting places.

As it turns mid-April, one can see ‘gold’ on the branches of silver oak trees planted along roads and in parks. Tufts of golden flowers lend a striking contrast to the silver-hued feathery leaves swaying with the breeze.

And soon enough as spring ripens into summer, the amaltas trees with their yellow flowers — oozing the radiance of the summer sun — and the gulmohars with their umbrella-shaped crowns, laden with scarlet red flower steal the show. Even if it’s too hot to savour the blaze of these colours; they paint the city with a Van Gogh-like bold strokes into an impressionist painting. The song of spring in Chandigarh is sung by its trees.

— The writer is founder member of the Chandigarh Tree Lovers, a group promoting awareness about the city’s tree heritage, and has co-authored Trees of Chandigarh