Primroses seem to be the kind of flower that you take for granted. Until you see one on a day late in spring in a Himalayan meadow so high that you are slightly short of breath for the lack of oxygen while crossing it. That would be the drumstick primrose (Primula denticulata). That’s why I was surprised to see it flowering in December in a greenhouse in Darjeeling’s Lloyd Botanical Garden.
I’d grown familiar with this plant in earlier visits to the Himalayas. More than a decade ago, I’d grown jaded enough to ignore it when I saw it. Seeing it flowering in winter in the hothouse, I wondered when I’d last seen it. The last photo I could find of one was from a walk in Sikkim’s Yumthang valley in 2010. Why haven’t I seen it after that? I checked for news about it, and the only news I could see was that the warming climate can now cause it to bloom in January if the temperature rises above 15 Celsius. But there were no reports of it disappearing. So I guess I just haven’t been at the right place at the right time.
So I was glad that a mad botanist in Darjeeling had decided to move these plants indoors. It was like seeing an old friend in a monkey cap sipping a hot chai in winter. I’d remembered the extreme variability in colour that this plant has. Of the two stalks of flowers next to each other, one was purple, the other pink. I walked on, resolving to visit the mountains in spring more often.
We stayed the night in a homestay in Lachung village. The village is named after the river it is on. In the morning we followed the river to Yumthang valley. We were on a trip to Sikkim, eleven years and eleven days ago. The road took us through a rhododendron sanctuary. I remember colours of rhododendron that I have not seen elsewhere. Purples, light reds, greenish yellow, and funereal white. It is an amazing sight, and one that I was planning to take my niece to see at the beginning of this month. Unfortunate that the country was locked down, and she was infected (she recovered very quickly). It will be another year before we can try to take that trip again.
The road continues to the open valley bordered by high mountains. It was cloudy, and extremely windy. Through the clouds we could see glaciers coming down the slopes of the surrounding mountains. Some people had camped there. I dipped a hand into the river. Cold. I was happy with a night in Lachung. There were trout in a holding pond. You are allowed to fish in the river. Was the trout supposed to be released back into the water?
It was a great place for photos. I wandered around taking in the primula, the irises, the glaciers. There were even butterflies; I got a photo of the Indian Tortoiseshell (Aglais caschmirensis). It was a lovely place, but by late morning I had a feeling that a spot of tea would come in handy. That’s one thing this place did not have. I wished I had thought of carrying a thermos full of tea up here.
They let the Zebra and the Giraffe get up; and Zebra moved away to some little thorn-bushes where the sunlight fell all stripy, and Giraffe moved off to some tallish trees where the shadows fell all blotchy.
‘Now watch,’ said the Zebra and the Giraffe. ‘This is the way it’s done. One—two—three! And where’s your breakfast?’
Leopard stared, and Ethiopian stared, but all they could see were stripy shadows and blotched shadows in the forest, but never a sign of Zebra and Giraffe. They had just walked off and hidden themselves in the shadowy forest.
Rudyard Kipling, in “How the Leopard got His Spots”, Just So Stories
Dotted and striped patterns arise repeatedly in nature: butterflies, flowers, fish, big cats. Kipling’s story seems to be verified by biologists. But what is the genesis of such patterns? In 1952 Alan M. Turing made an observation that people have built on since then. He wrote: “It is suggested that a system of chemical substances, called morphogens, reacting together and diffusing through a tissue, is adequate to account for the main phenomena of morphogenesis. Such a system, although it may originally be quite homogeneous, may later develop a pattern or structure due to an instability of the homogeneous equilibrium, which is triggered off by random disturbances.” The featured photo of the river in Yumthang explains what Turing meant. Imagine a tub of perfectly still water. Sunlight falling on it would illuminate the bottom of the uniformly. Now take the random winds that disturb water in a river, and the random placing of obstructions below. The net effect is a series of interlocking ripples which refract the water and give that dotted pattern of shadows on river bottom. Turing realized that patterns in nature could arise in the same way, due to the flow of pigments being disturbed during the early development of the organism. Subsequent authors have studied and begun to understand how these patterns are formed by the actions of genes, and how they are inherited.
Before my day can start, I make myself a cup of tea, and look at photos from a ten years old trip. Sikkim is one of the places I would like to go back to as soon as I can. The Family and I have been trying to organize our work so that we can begin to travel again. International travel is a long way off, but India offers immense opportunities. There will probably be a window of opportunity in the next six months, when cases have declined, and the adventurous can start to travel again.
My trip through Lachung and Yumthang had been too short. An overnight stay in Lachung (elevation 2.9 Kms) was followed by a day trip up the Lachung river towards the Yumthang valley and its Rhododendron sanctuary. The weather is usually bad, but the sight of glaciers descending from the clouds can be a welcome change, even if you are cold and wet. On our trip the clouds were so dense that we could not even sight the fabulous Chombu peak. Well under 7 Kms high, the peak remains unclimbed even today.
But spending a day walking around the village of Lachung can be rewarding. The Lepcha who live here cheek by jowl with Tibetans are very pleasant people. Ten years ago the place was small, but years of tourism after that must have caused it to expand. This would have been interrupted by the immense earthquake which happened the year after our visit, but surely the village has been built back up by now. I have many photos of the wooden houses with their cheerfully coloured doors, and I would like to see them again.
One of the other nearby places I remember fondly is the Lachung monastery, a quiet 19th-century structure. It was deserted when we visited. We walked around it, admiring the solidity of the walls and the great upkeep. The Tibetan Buddhist monasteries have a colour scheme which is simultaneously extremely visible, because of the whitewashed walls, and immensely restful because of the small areas of earth colours, mainly black and ocher, with little touches of blue and green. I wonder how well it survived the earthquake.
The monastery has a wonderful garden and orchard. I spent a long time admiring the apple blossoms, and the moss growing on it. That was a time when I began to wonder whether an aesthetic I had considered Japanese could actually be widespread within world Buddhism. The delight in nature, the accidental and fleeting, which is captured in the Japanese phrase wabi sabi could perhaps be a Buddhist response to what the religion considers to be a fleeting and passing life. We flitted through this part of the Himalayas quickly. After the day trip up the Lachung river, we were back to the village at the confluence of the Lachung and Lachen rivers. The next three days were taken up by a trip up the Lachen to the high lake of Gurudongmar. Perhaps our next trip could be slow.
Don't hold your breath 