A case for increasing urban green cover
ALLADI JAYASRI
GOLDEN TREES, GREENSPACES AND URBAN FORESTRY: S. G. Neginhal; pub. by author, 643, 2nd Cross, 9th Main, III Stage, III Block, Basaveshwaranagar, Bangalore-560079. Rs. 750.
Urban forestry became a buzzword in the 1980s, thanks to former Chief Minister R. Gundu Rao's conviction that increasing the tree cover in Bangalore is best handled by forest officers who were normally confined to managing and protecting reserve forests.
His successor, Ramakrishna Hegde, took up from where Gundu Rao left off, and the years from 1982-87 came to be what retired forest officer S.G. Neginhal, describes as the "golden years" that saw a dramatic increase in Bangalore's green cover.
Gundu Rao's decision to transfer the tree-planting work to the Forest Department from the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike and the Bangalore Development Authority paid off and Neginhal virtually authored the greening of Bangalore by planting 15 lakh tall seedlings from 1982 to 1988, picking up the Indira Priyadarshini Vriksha Mitra award for this noble task. It even attracted the attention of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and he soon had the Director of Horticulture of Delhi to examine how it could be replicated in Delhi. Urban forestry even made it to the Five-Year Plans as a subject to be budgeted for.
Features
How Bangalore got a bigger tree canopy, and how to protect it from the rapid pace of infrastructure development that is gaining on its green spaces, is what Neginhal's latest book, Golden Trees Greenspaces and Urban Forestry is all about. This is a sequel to his book A Handbook of City Trees.
The book covers everything from morphology and aesthetics of 142 trees, their flowering seasons, and the range of uses they can be put to, their medicinal value planting techniques and tree-care. Their imperceptible role in arresting pollution, acting as dust-busters, reducing noise pollution by muffling the sounds of urban living, their cooling effect on the city's temperatures, and how all of this can help keep climate change at bay for a little while longer, and everything you wanted to know about trees and why you need to keep them, are in this book.
The author, who also wields a camera and loves haring off into the forests in search of wildlife to "shoot" and frame, has used 72 colour plates, many his own, and several which friends like T.N.A.Perumal, Balakrishna Gowda, S.Pankaj, R. Deo, and M.N.Jayaprakash have offered him.
An interesting section of the book, on managing urban green spaces, dwells at some length on the history of urban forestry, rural forestry, covering cities outside the Indian sub-continent, and ancient civilisations such as Indus Valley, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, the Vedic period, the Aryan era, and allusions in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the period of the Buddha and Mahavira, the Mauryan age and through to the Moghul period, the coming of the European influence and also the post-Independence urban forestry.
This book has the potential to be the Bible for city planners, landscapers, foresters, horticulturists, naturalists and bird-watchers, and that new breed called `tree-walkers'. Its chapters on management of green spaces, gardens and parks, and benefits of caring for these trees, and the emphasis on education, training and publicity, bear testimony to this fact.
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