bangalore trees

NERALU, a citizen-led tree festival, is being organised on 18th and 19th February 2017, at Natonal Gallery of Modern Arts (NGMA) and other city-wide venues. Come February, Bengaluru’s trees burst into spectacular blooms. The first of its kind in Bengaluru, Neralu, which means ‘shade’ in Kannada, is being planned to coincide with the blooming season in the city, and will bring together citizens to celebrate the garden city’s glorious natural heritage. Bound by a common love for trees, naturalists, ecologists, artists, technologists, storytellers, homemakers, photographers and many more citizens from all walks of life are working together to organise Neralu.…

The public consultations organised tree cutting for Metro Phase II in Bengaluru have been repeatedly cancelled due to lack of data and procedural lapses. Activists who were present in the Metro public consultation on March 11 demanded that the data on planted trees and the trees to be cut be made public. Namma Metro had uploaded the tree cutting data, however there was no map done by Namma Metro. This map has been created using the data provided in the BMRCL website. Click on the individual balloons to see the type of tree and cordinates. Here are the trees to…

Pic: Aditi Surendra Bengaluru had many lakes 40 years ago. Today there are a very few lakes left today. Most of the lakes like Varthur lake, Sarakki lake, Banaswadi lake etc. have been or are being destroyed because a few greedy, inhuman, insensitive and socially irresponsible people cause wanton destruction and grab the land as real estate prices go sky high. The Varthur lake is being filled with sewage and other chemicals. Once the lake is dead, these people can say the land is unfit to be a lake and use it to construct buildings. This is done to circumvent…

A cluster of banyans that are home to seven thousand bats A 150 foot tall araucaria tree from New Caledonia! Gnarled and irregular trunks of ancient tamarind trees that are around 800 years old in a Devarakadu (god’s grove) near Bangalore! A keelback snake just about to swallow its breakfast in Lalbagh. These are extracts from Heritage Trees and Green Heritage Sites by Vijay Thiruvady, published by Bangalore Environment Trust on behalf of their project sponsors. To say that Thiruvady is a walking encyclopaedia on trees and wooded areas in and around Bangalore would not be far from the truth.…