Paths are made for walking

The warm spring season in Feb-March is my favourite time of year.
As you walk by the different species of trees that line the roads, most of them in flower, the mild, yet intoxicating, fragrances emanating from them make you breathe more, deeper and fuller. The honge is in a class of its own, its mauve & white tiny flowers forming a carpet that attracts the apis indica in their hundreds and releasing the scents of a million blossoms in spring that power the imagination. No less is the large leaf Mahogany (about which I have written in the earlier post), the now-scantily flowering Cork tree (Millingtonia Hortensis to those who know of Millington, the great botanist in pre-Independence India) and the Champaka in white and blood red.
Stop to look around you and up into the foliage and you are greeted with a riot of colours, with the Tabebuias leading from the front. Colours from the delicate to the resplendent, from the ridiculous to the sublime – only Nature could prepare this Planter's Punch, in a moment of heady mirth. Walk longer, a lot longer, to reach Lalbagh and a lot more is in store – the Flame of the Forest (Butea), now alas a rarity in the city, the Coral Tree, the Silk Cottons in two colours that would shock and awe, the giant Mahua, the flowers of which would make a heady brew and, as April dawns and the season of Vishu begins (the Malayalam new year), the most beautiful, the most delicate, the most inexplicably charming necklace of petals, the Laburnum (Cassia Fistula, Vishu Kanni in God's own language).

As you can see, this is clearly my pick; I can spend a happy hour by a laburnum, watching the necklaces of yellow sway in the mild breeze, drop some flowers or draw a dizzy bee into their midst. When our ancestors first set store by this tree, profiling it as sacred, setting its flowers aside for worship and giving an otherwise ordinary tree a place of pride, it was because they had had their moments of exultant de bonheur, an unbrindled happiness at the sight of the Laburnum. We have a lot to learn from the history of beauty.