Red blooms on mind’s eye

The year was 1967. I was awaiting my matriculation examination result when we moved to Chandigarh on account of my father opting to serve in the newly created state of Haryana. 

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I was excited as Chandigarh was hailed as the most beautiful city to live in. We rented a house in Sector 18. I was bowled over by the expansive open areas, parks, wide roads and neat planning of the city. What struck me most was the beauty of an 8-ft-tall tree, or the shrub that fascinatingly stood on one side of the main gate of our house. Its ‘cascading branches and fire-work like red bloom’ took my breath away. The drooping branches laden with cylindrical bristle-like red blooms, swinging and swaying in the pleasant breeze, were captivating.

I had never seen a spectacle like that before, though I had heard that Chandigarh abounded with incredible varieties of flowering trees. Later, I learnt that it was called bottlebrush, endemic to Australia, but grew in many other regions.

As per the night security drill of my mother, my cot would be laid near the main gate by the driveway.

I would lie under the clear open sky, with only the cover of a mosquito net. It was heavenly to be woken up by the humming and singing of bulbul and other tiny sunbirds flitting around the bottlebrush bloom at the gate, early in the morning as dawn would dispel the darkness of night. I would lie in bed in dreamy indolence as if under a spell, watching the ecstatic dance of nectar-sucking birds and soft singing of spring in ‘full-throated ease’, until it was broken by the reproofs of my mother on the ills of oversleeping.

It was love at first sight and an unending affair with the bottlebrush. It laid buried deep in heart during the years of my police service. It blossomed again in full intensity when I decided to work for the beautification of my village after retirement.

As we drew up plans in consultation with villagers and a local forest officer, a perplexing problem stared us in the face. The brackish underground water, high salinity in soil, waterlogging and flooding during monsoon won’t let the trees grow. Voila! The bright bloom of the bottlebrush of the 1960s flashed across my mind vividly, and I instantly started reading about it on the Internet.

To my utter delight, I found that bottlebrush could tolerate saline soils, waterlogging and other hostile botanical hurdles. Consequently, we planted hundreds of them over the last few years, and due to their distinctive flowering pattern, our village environment gets twice filled with colours and fragrance. And the countless number of nectar-sucking birds descends on them and breaks in song and dance in their ecstatic exuberance. It is a sight to behold. What a joyous bliss!