Saturday, 3 March 2018

Butea Monosperma (Palash)

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Flame of the Forest

Palash (Butea monosperma)
I spent the summer of 2017 at my cousin's place in Sindhudurg, Maharashtra. I have a lot of good memories attached with that place. One of them were the evening walks. We used to walk a distance of four-five km and back. It is a rural area and all there was to see were trees -- lots of them. I remember one perfectly. The orange canopy of the flowering tree glowing like a fire in the evening sun and breeze, cast a shadow on the road. My6 cousin said the flowers were called Palash. I picked one up from the many that had fallen on the road. Here is some more information that I managed to gather.
The Palash flower grows on a medium-sized deciduous tree whose growth is very slow. The flowers are bright reddish orange. The flowers are used to make colours on the festival of Holi as per tradition. It is also used as a dye for fabric. The benefit of having a Palash tree near your house is more than just visual gratification. The flowers give off a smell that attracts mosquitoes which use the flower's fluids to lay eggs. These eggs, fortunately for us, never hatch, and mosquitoes can get stuck in the fluids and die.
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