Wandering around Kaas on a wet day

On the verge of the parking lot just below Kaas plateau I came across a chest high growth of Chinese knotwood, whose flowers are featured above. On reading a bit, I learnt that this kind of branched bush is characteristic of knotwoods (family Polygonaceae). Information on this species is hard to find because its Latin double-barrelled name has changed many times; it is known as Polygonum praetermissum, P. auriculata, P. chinense, Persicaria chinensis among others. I could figure out that the round berries are edible. Interestingly, it turns out that of the sixty known species in this family, most are found in the Tibetan plateau, and have diversified only in the last ten million years. The home ground of P. chinensis seems to lie along the arc of the Himalayas, and continuing down to Thailand, Indonesia and Malayasia. It is an invasive species, and is probably poised to take over the Kaas plateau, just as it is taking over parts of the US.

The Indian arrowroot, which I spotted growing cheek-to-jowl with the Topli Karvi, is a much more sedate plant. A member of the Zingiberaceae (ginger) family, its name has recently changed from Hitchenia caulina to Curcuma caulina. Its Marathi name, chavar, seems to be well documented. Its tubers yield an edible starch. It grows mainly in high plateaus of the Western ghats, like Kaas, so it is vulnerable to a loss of habitat. Since it is economically important as well as endangered, there is an international effort on to cultivate it. I saw very few of these flowers, and came to the conclusion that it is not very common even in the Kaas plateau.

I kept seeing the spikes of the karambal every now and then, with a few small purple-pink petals growing out of the cylinder. I kept postponing a photo, hoping to get one covered with petals. Then when one of my companions told me that this is all I was likely to see, I stopped and took the photo which you can see above. A member of the Acanthaceae family, this ankle-high plant, Justicia procumbens, is given the rather fanciful English common name of water willow. Maybe the name is given because the leaves of the plant, like those of the willow, are ground into a paste used to treat asthma and coughs. This plant is widely reported in the Deccan plateau, found in Kumaon, known in Japan and Korea and used in Chinese medicine, but is vulnerable to habitat loss.

Plants cannot run away from attack; their defensive mechanism is chemistry. Because of this, they have developed a strange armoury of subtle chemicals over their long evolutionary history. That’s the reason why we keep finding in plants new and useful molecular weapons to combat diseases. It will be a pity if the fruits, so to say, of megayears of evolution disappear in the next couple of decades. The fence around the Kaas plateau, and the effort of growing plants in the Kew gardens are last-ditch measures.

Two herbs

I saw a single stalk bearing these white flowers sticking out of a green meadow some distance away. It was foggy on the Kaas plateau. The rain had left little droplets of water suspended from the flowers. As I tried to take photos, I thought that they reminded me of lilies. Later I wasn’t sure whether it was a lily or a confusingly similar orchid. I thought I would see it again elsewhere, but didn’t come across it later. As a result, this somewhat noisy photo is the only one I have.

When I eventually identified it as Dipcadi montanum (conflated with D. ursulae by Ingalhalikar), it turned out that its classification is contentious. It used to be placed in the family Liliaceae. By the time Ingalhalikar wrote his book it had been moved to family Asparagaceae. Recent papers split off the subfamily and class it as a separate family Hyacinthaceae. I’ll go with this. Classification of angiosperms is being transformed by molecular data, so the older classifications are never going to come back.

This herb is said to be widespread but rare and endangered. Its claimed rarity agrees with my personal observation. In India it has been reported from various parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Bihar, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh. Eflora India has photos which show bladderwort (Utricularia) growing nearby. Interestingly, my only photo of bladderwort came from the same patch where I saw these flowers. Is there really some connection between them?

At the other end of the scale of rarity were chest-high bushes of the common hill borage, with the double-barrelled name of Adelocaryum coelestinum. The pale blue flowers of this forget-me-not (family Boraginaceae) grow along long stalks, as in the featured photo. The tiny five-petalled white flowers have a beautiful blue center. They are widely spotted in Maharashtra and Goa, but probably also grow in neighbouring states, including arid Gujarat.

I lumped these two together because I couldn’t find any documented use for them, neither as remedies against disease, nor as food. As of now, it seems that they are just beautiful flowers which we can enjoy looking at.

Dew grass and cat’s ears

In my reading about the flowers of the Kaas plateau, I’d not remembered the flower which is called abhali in Marathi. But when I started walking through the meadows of Kaas, these beautiful flowers attracted attention instantly. I saw them poking up through fields of Topli Karvi. It seemed to me that they grew in patches where the Karvy was not in bloom, but this impression was heavily biased by the memories of places where I stood and took photos. I cross checked it by looking again at the panoramic shots I’d taken of flowering bushes of Topli Karvi, and found that in this case my general impression was probably correct. The abhali blooms where the Topli Karvi does not, but they both like the same kind of soil.

The Cyanotis tuberosa seems to have multiple names: it is called abhali in Marathi, valukaikizhangu and netha kina in Tamil, and is referred to by the fanciful names of Cat’s ears or Dew grass. The English names were probably given in colonial times, when its habitat was being systematically destroyed by converting the forests into coffee and tea plantations. The habitat destruction continued with the widespread planting of Eucalyptus, and the building of large dams.

Abhali is widespread. Apart from the Kaas plateau, I found it listed as growing in Karnataka, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, and in the eastern Himalayas. So habitat destruction perhaps does not affect this plant as much as many others. It is the only Cyanotis species complex which has tubers; as a result, it can put out leaves and start to bloom as soon as the monsoon starts. In Kaas it blooms from August to October and around Bangalore it has been reported to bloom in May.

The plant is widely listed as human-edible and medicinal, for example, in the encyclopaedic Wildlife and Ground Flora: an interaction scenario of forests of Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri by A. B. Chaudhuri and D. D. Sarkar. At the other end of the country, in Tamil Nadu, the root is ground into a paste and eaten to treat diabetes, and also as a vegetable. In Karnataka it is supposed to relieve coughs. All in all, it seems to be a very familiar plant in many parts of India.

I wonder whether it could have spread through India in recent times? If its origin is in the Deccan plateau, then the fact that it is strongly dependent on the monsoon could have prevented a spread through the dry lands of central and western India. The monsoon opens up corridors along the eastern coast of India, allowing it to spread up through Orissa and Bengal into the eastern Himalayas. I could not find reports of it growing in the western Himalayas. Why?

I didn’t know any of this as I knelt on paths and tried to focus on the hairy flower. Now, I wonder why its petals are like hairy filaments which trap beads of water. Does this have a purpose?

Carnivores in the wild

When I listen to fellow tourists during trips to jungles, it is clear that the stars are the carnivores: tigers, leopards, even wild dogs. In fact I often meet people who do not enjoy the strangeness of tropical jungles, and consider a trip wasted unless they see a tiger close up. So it is also during a visit to the kilometer-high plateau of Kaas: the carnivorous plants of this inselberg enjoy stardom, but are seldom seen or recognized. These stars are the sundew (featured photo) and the small purple flowers of the bladderwort (below right).

The bladderworts, such as the Utriculata purpurea whose purple flowers you see in the photo alongside, are the tiger of this jungle. These bladderworts are rootless plants that float on patches of water. I saw them in growing in close conjunction with other small herbs. Since I was a tourist and not a biologist, I did not try to separate them out to check whether they are free floating. The close association with other plants makes it likely that they float on a mat of vegetation. A recent study found large communities of living algae and rotifers in the bladders of some individuals of this species growing in Florida. So it is possible that Seeta’s tears, as this species is called locally, derives a benefit from supporting an ecosystem within itself, rather than eating everything. To push the analogy further, U. purpurea, may not be the Kumbhakarna it is often thought to be, waking from sleep during the monsoon to eat everything that lands in the bladder. By supporting communities of living creatures, it may be closer in function to Seeta’s mother: the earth itself.

At the moment I care more about Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world.

Charles Darwin (19860) in a letter to Charles Lyell

Carnivorous plants are usually found in wet and nutrient poor soils. Like many of these plants, the sundew is poor at competing with neighbouring plants for light. We found three of them, probably Drosera Indica, in patches of ground below the roots of Topli Karvi bushes. I often wondered about whether the sundew is beneficial to humans or not, and was pleased to see a positive answer. Apparently Drosera preferentially eat mosquitoes, midges, and biting flies, which would otherwise proliferate in these wetlands, and therefore pose public health hazards.

While watching tigers you may also watch birds. While trying to take the featured photo of the sundew, I thought I saw a little tuft of grass growing next to it. When I looked at it again I thought that maybe it was not grass but a lily. I took a photo, and later saw that I was mistaken again. The tiny flowers at the tips of some of the stalks were clearly protected by a single modified leaf. This is called a spathe. Its presence means that the plant belongs to the family Araceae and so is cousin to Irises and Crocuses. I wish I’d looked more carefully at it in the field and tried to take a closer photo of the unfurled spathe and the inflorescence which it protects. Not having made this observation, I have no identification. Please help, if you can.

Just in case you like to read about plants, I will leave you to settle down to read this interesting scientific review of the state of our knowledge of carnivorous plants.

Kaas: a Deccan Plateau

Head out of Mumbai, pass the Expressway and its food courts, and you soon come into impressive weathered hills. Strange shapes rise out of the land. Pass Pune, and head South, and you begin to see ranges of hills with a very characteristic feature: they seem to form gigantic layers or steps. If you look carefully at the far, mist covered, hills in the photo alongside you see these characteristic layers. They are volcanic features called “trappen” in Swedish, meaning steps. Successive volcanic eruptions created these layers.

A closer and clearer view of the steps is in this photo taken at the Thosegarh waterfalls south of the town of Satara. These layers are called the Deccan traps. It is thought that thirty thousand years of continuous volcanic eruptions laid down these layers of basalt over a huge part of the Indian plate. This happened while dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Since then the volcanic rock has worn down to a half million square kilometres area in the Deccan plateau.

This is the geology within which the Kaas and neighbouring kilometer-high plateaus stand. Over millennia, the basalt was weathered down by successive dry and wet seasons until it is a porous rock. You can see the weathered rock, called laterite, in the featured photo. Over this laterite is a thin layer of red iron-rich soil called lateritic soil. You can see in the photo alongside how poor the soil is. The grasses and the low herbs of these plateaus, including Kaas, barely manage to hold the soil together. Of all the things that damage this fragile ecosystem, tourists are the worst, although the construction of windmill farms and extraction of bauxite also harmful. Reading about this area, I discovered the word “inselberg”, meaning island mountain. It is a very apt description of these plateaus: each stands isolated from others. The flora of each of these inselbergs is different from that in the surrounding lowlands. Environmental degradation of a plateau is like killing off the ecology of an island. It seems that of the 850 odd species of herbs identified here (including genera found only here), more than 600 are on the IUCN red list of threatened species.

The ministry of the environment lists many benefits that these ecosystems provide, including medicinal plants. Another ecosystem service provided by this fragile system is the recharging of the surrounding water table. As you can see in the photo here, the grasses and herbs trap water into little monsoon pools. This water is then absorbed by the spongy laterite rocks. In the absence of the flora, the water would run off too fast to be soaked up. The average annual rainfall here is between 2 and 2.5 meters, so this is quite a service!

The eight year itch

I can’t believe that I wrote a piece saying goodbye to the monsoon on Saturday. On Sunday I was at the Kaas plateau. It rained all morning. The thin layer of soil was saturated with rain. Then other Sunday visitors turned up, and the soil on the road turned to a well-churned slush. The official website says that 3000 people are allowed each day. It seemed to me that there were many more people there on Sunday. People waiting to get into the fenced-off part of the plateau lost their patience. Someone lost their spectacles. I found the featured image.

The press has been full of reports about the Topli Karvi (Strobilanthes sessilis) blooming this year after a gap of eight years. We found fields full of flowering Topli Karvi (see the photo alongside). But then there were large patches of these knee-high bushes which did not have any flowers. The Family had visited the plateau last year and come back with photos of Topli Karvi flowering in some patches.

Seeing her photos, I’d speculated that Topli Karvi could bloom once in eight years, but different patches could bloom in different years. Then this would not be a textbook case of mast seeding, such as that seen in the related Strobilanthes Kunthiana (Neelakurinji, which is supposed to flower next in 2018), in which the plants die after flowering. Incomplete synchronization of the flowering of some species of Strobilanthes has been reported from Japan, so this is not a radical idea. It would be nice to see data on this species.

I did not see any of the usual pollinators. Perhaps it was raining too hard. The previous evening, near the Thosegarh waterfalls I’d seen Indian honeybees in a stand of the related Strobilanthes callosus (Karvi). Dhamorikar has a very interesting observation about the Karvi: it is pollinated by bees, flies, ants, some moths and maybe even the Oriental White-eye. He speculates that the purple colour of the Karvi has evolved to attract a large number of pollinators.

There aren’t that many flowering cycles of Karvi in a lifetime. More than one life may be required to solve the mysteries of the blooming of the Karvi.

Memories of rain

The name of this post is the title of a book by Sunetra Gupta which I loved. The Family and I were still busy discovering each others’ tastes in books when she recommended it to me. After reading the book about a failing cross cultural marriage, I began to follow her advise about what to read. "But this is not that story", as Aragorn says at the gate of Barad Dur.

This is a little post to commemorate the end of the monsoon for this year. We have travelled long distances during these four tedious months. The green that sprouts from the earth during this time is incredible. It seems that there is a twenty thousand year long climatic cycle [alternate link] during which the monsoons are good. During the peak of such times the Sinai desert and the Arabian peninsula bloom, and provide a path connecting Africa and the Eurasian continent. During two such long wet seasons humans migrated out of Africa. The first left only enigmatic traces in our DNA and the second wave colonized the world. This is not such a green period. We live in times when the Sinai and the Arabian peninsula are great deserts.

You wouldn’t believe it if you drove in India in the last four months. Here are three views through the windshields of cars which I took in Kerala and Maharashtra during this monsoon. The interior of the car becomes humid and warm, and you need to turn on a blast of air to keep the windows from fogging up. And then you can look out into a world which has become strange and silent. Another year till we come back to this time again.

Monsoon flowers

The Sahyadris come alive with flowers in the late monsoon. As we get ready for a weekend in the Kaas plateau, I decided to look again at the wild flowers I’d photographed when we were lost between Dolkhamb and Kasara about a month ago. I took out my newly acquired three-volume set of the flowers of the Sahyadris and decided that I must identify all the photos I have.

The easiest to identify is the Silver Cockscomb, called kombda in Marathi, whose binomial is Celosia argentea. Many years ago, when I first started to take macro photos, I’d noticed this as a plant which attracts many kinds of butterflies. I could wait by a patch in any open piece of land, and I would definitely get a few satisfactory shots of butterflies. Unfortunately, mid-August is too early in the season for butterflies. There are lots of other pollinators around, but the colourful Lepidoptera of the Sahyadris emerge a month later. So this time I only have a photo of the blossom (featured image).

A patch of Murdannia pauciflora in an open field

The purple flowers in the background took me a while to identify. It was called Murdannia wightii in a checklist prepared in 1965, and gets into the field guide of the flowers of the Sahyadris under this name. But the website of the Botanical Survey of India says that it is more properly called by the name Murdannia pauciflorum since it was identified as such in 1892. No common name is recorded, not even in Marathi. There were so many of these in fallow fields that I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t have a local name.

Common balsam (Impatiens balsamina)

The common Balsam was a flower that I knew well when I was a child. My gradparents’ garden always had a patch of these in some corner. Over the years I’d forgotten it. Then in August I saw whole hillsides covered with these lovely purple flowers. Bees buzzed among them. I knew I should have been able to name them. Eventually, I resorted to asking an aunt, and got an instant identification.

Blumea mollis in a shady overgrown patch under a tree

An identification which really bothered me was these tiny flowers which I saw growing in the shade of some trees in a rocky patch of land next to a rice field. I’m not certain yet that it is indeed Blumea mollis, but that’s the closest I have got. I’ll keep looking, and if I find a better identification I’ll come back and change it. But for the moment I let it stand.

Monsoon mela

Something weird has happened in the last decade. Very large numbers of people from Mumbai go and stand under a waterfall in the Sahyadris during the monsoon. I suppose they always wanted to, but the prosperity of the last decade has finally enabled them to. The photo you see here is of the Ashoka waterfall about a 100 kilometers from Mumbai on a weekend.

The waterfall was steep, and the path to the crowded pool was down a steep rocky face. It seemed as crowded as a suburban railway station at rush hour. We had gone to get away from the city, and turned away at the sight of crowds as dense as any we see on a working day. Such a density of humans would be dangerous in almost any situation. Fortunately, a car can only deliver you about a kilometer away on a slushy road, otherwise the place would be even more dangerous than it is. We remembered many recent newspaper stories about accidental deaths by drowning. From the statistics published by the National Crime Records Bureau it seems that rates of accidental death by drowning in Maharashtra are high compared to the rest of the country.

On the drive back we noticed a few spots where cars and motorbikes were parked haphazardly at the edge of the highway near a stream falling over the side. People were clambering over the stones below to take selfies in the “waterfalls”. If a large number of people take similar selfies, it usually means a social-media buzz.

Why? The Family feels that more people have cars, they drive, and there are few places to drive to. This is true; most of the people we saw are young and newly affluent. But the same people could have done anything in the mountains. We did see some groups on open meadows, sitting down to a picnic lunch. A very few go trekking. Some probably go and have an impromptu dance. Could it be that some movies in recent years have kicked off a frenzy of selfies under cascading water?

Dolkhamb market

We tried to follow a road which petered out after the market square in Dolkhamb. It was flanked by two long structures. One was an office, and the other, which you see in the photo below, was a row of shops. This was one of the larger villages we had passed in the previous twenty kilometres. Off to one side was a little open space where several utility vehicles were parked: they serve as local buses. The market was crowded. We oozed through it to ask for directions. As we talked to the “bus” drivers, more vehicles arrived, bringing people to add to the crowd.

For some time now we have been trying to eat a larger variety of vegetables and greens than what our meals had reduced to. So the sight of a village market brought out the gatherers in us. On a side of the road was a line of people who had set up makeshift stalls. The featured image shows the lady nearest to us. She had four different kinds of vegetables: tomatoes, knobbly green karela (bitter gourd), fresh okra and large green chilis. Not a large variety, but incredibly fresh. The okra was crisp and snapped easily between my fingers. After her a man sat with small heaps of dried fish. There were fruits further on. The Family bought bananas and apples. The apples were small and not very colourful, but when we bit into them they were extremely flavourful.

Once upon a time these were available in all markets in Mumbai. Now WTO rules force us to import apples which are too expensive to be sold anywhere except in big towns and cities. As a result, these profitable markets are almost completely shut to local apples. We love to eat, and we are not politically committed to local produce. We do like the fact that globalization brings us food from far away, but we are also aware of the variety that local produce can bring to our table. We have read enough about the carbon cost of pushing fruits around continents to begin to take the trouble to visit farmer’s markets. It would be a pity if we were forced to make a choice between the planet and the economy without thinking through sustainable middle paths. (I’m afraid that sentence might succeed in offending both sides of a political divide which exists, but need not).

The most exciting discovery was a truck of assorted greens, presided over by a lady in a red sari (photo alongside). People walked up to a boy, probably her son, paid him and asked for the greens they needed. He would shout out the order, and she would throw it out of the truck. We bought a bunch of fresh fenugreek and coriander greens from the duo. This family also pushes vegetables around in a box which burns hydrocarbons. But they travel tens of kilometres, not thousands. With fresh produce in the car and virtuous thoughts in our heads, we ignited the non-renewable fossil fuel in the tank of our car and drove out along the road the local drivers told us to take.