The Mother of Trees: How One Woman’s Sorrow Bloomed Into 8,000 Banyans
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
June 5, 2023
On this day, when the world unites to celebrate our precious environment, let us turn our attention to a most remarkable gardener who has cultivated not merely plants, but a living legacy.
At the venerable age of 107, India's beloved Saalumarada Thimmakka stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when one's hands are guided by both despair and determination.
My dear gardening enthusiasts, prepare yourselves for a tale that will surely make your own modest horticultural efforts seem rather pedestrian by comparison.
Our protagonist, a young woman who married a local herdsman, found herself at the age of 40 confronting that most devastating of realizations - she would bear no children to carry her name into the future. So profound was her grief that she contemplated that most final of solutions.
Yet from the soil of despair sprouts the most tenacious of hopes! Rather than surrendering to melancholy, Thimmakka and her husband conceived a different sort of family - one that would stretch its leafy arms toward the heavens and provide shelter to countless creatures.
Banyan trees became their children. As Thimmakka herself explained with admirable pragmatism:
"Banyan trees offer shade and the fruit is food for several creatures."
One must marvel at the dedication!
After laboring in the fields all day, this extraordinary couple would carry water to nurture their growing brood - all 384 of them, planted along a four-kilometer stretch of highway. Such devotion puts our occasional forgetting to water the petunias to absolute shame, does it not?
When her husband departed this mortal realm in 1991, did Thimmakka abandon her arboreal offspring?
Certainly not!
She continued her sacred mission with undiminished vigor. Together, this remarkable pair has introduced an estimated 8,000 trees to our grateful planet - a family far larger than most could ever dream of creating.
The people of India, recognizing true nobility when they see it, have bestowed upon her the title Mother of Trees.
And indeed, what mother could be more deserving of celebration on this World Environment Day?
One wonders how many of us, faced with life's disappointments, might transform our sorrows into such magnificent contributions to the world.
Perhaps the next time you place a humble seed into the earth, you might reflect upon Thimmakka's example and consider what forests of possibility await within your own gardening gloves.
