It is indeed a botanist’s delight

It is indeed a botanist’s delight

Divya Gandhi

A book on foliage on the IISc. campus will be released soon



GREENERY: One of the roads on the IISc. campus with a thick canopy.

Bangalore: One hundred years ago, when the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) acquired its campus in the city, it was not quite the green oasis it is today. In 1909, the campus was essentially a vast tract of thorny shrubs and rocky outcrops characteristic of the stark landscape of the Deccan Plateau.

Interestingly, the exotic flowering trees, orchids and sedges that set apart the IISc from the concrete jungle (and keep it several degrees cooler), were brought from all over the world as part of a greening project that began in the 1930s.

The history of IISc.’s greening and botanical details of over 200 kinds of spectacular flowering trees and plants will now be captured in a pictorial book “Indian Institute of Science Campus: A Botanist’s Delight” which will soon be released as part of the centenary celebrations.

It took K. Sankara Rao, distinguished fellow at IISc.’s Centre of Ecological Sciences (CES) three years and dozens of visits to capture each plant in full bloom. “The trees have been brought from across the country and from around the world,” he said.

The large woody creeper that twines around the CES building was brought from the Western Ghats; the vermillion-flowered Sterculia colorata outside the metallurgy department comes from south-east Asia and the tall coniferous trees that flank the main administrative building are from Australia, he explained. Among those to whom IISc. owes its greening is Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel, one of the chief architects of Lalbagh Botanical Gardens who introduced several exotic plants in Bangalore. “However there are still precious pockets of original vegetation left. There are several old trees, including the banyan that pre-date the campus,” he added.

Prof. Rao said he wanted to include the smaller groups of flora such as fungi and mosses. “Every sidewalk, avenue, and unattended corner has its own flora. The 320-acre campus even has its own micro-habitats. However, the plants represented in the book are only a fraction of the flora in the campus. In my guesstimate IISc. has upwards of 800 plants,” he added.