A flower blooms

A droplet quivered on the rim of the unopened white bud. The rains lashed down heavily. But Vinod Patil, unencumbered by rainwear, his red cap at a jaunty tilt, appeared unperturbed.

The canopy of trees held off the rain somewhat, but the stream at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park was gushing effusively. Patil, who was guiding our group of walkers, parted the branches and pointed to the purple flowers hanging from the dark green stems. “That,” he said, “is the karvi .”

It was 10 am on a Sunday. A moment eight years in the making had finally arrived. Karvi, the lilac flowers which transforms the verdant hilly slopes, had last bloomed in 2008. And now it is back.

Dozens of people were scattered across the Goregaon side of the park, in the thick undergrowth, to catch the glories of the elusive karvi early in the morning. I was among those slashing and sliding through bushes, mud and free-flowing stream.

“It’s better to walk through the stream,” said Patil, “the ground is too slippery.”

It was day one of the weeklong karvi festival and guided trails have been organised by the Bombay Natural History Society’s (BNHS) Conservation Education Centre. One will have to wait till 2024 for the next festival. “If you miss this,” said Atul Sathe, an assistant director with the BNHS CEC, during the festival’s inauguration earlier that morning, “You will have to wait eight years to get another glimpse of this marvellous flower.”

This wild flower is ( Strobilanthes callosa ) found in Thane, Goregaon and Mahabaleshwar in Maharashtra as well as parts of the Konkan, the Nilgiris and other areas in Karnataka. There are more than 15 different varieties under the genus.

“This is a funny plant,” said Vijay D Mendhulkar, professor and head of Botany at the Institute of Science in Mumbai. “It attracts very few enemies because it is normally a dry plant.” The plant is known to have medicinal properties, although the leaf is believed to be poisonous. “Even poisonous things have a medicinal component,” said Mendhulkar.

During its brief blooming period, karvi also produces a thick, viscous honey, usually gathered by local people. The other parts of the plant also have their uses. “The stalks when dried are used to thatch roofs,” Patil explained. The stalks looked tender, but they were sturdy enough for use in building houses, he said.

All along the trail, the purple flowers hung at eye-level. Many buds were yet to open, but the flowering had already begun. Further afield there was wild ginger and turmeric plants.

The karvi blooms for about two weeks, providing a burst of colour to the monsoon landscape, and then takes almost a decade to return. So why the long gap? The short answer is, it’s just nature. “The life cycle is genetically determined that way,” said Mendhulkar. “It takes that long for the plant physiologically. It is not ready to mature earlier.”

The plant grows on sloping terrain, prevents soil erosion and ensures that the lakes abutting the hills around Mumbai retain their full water-carrying capacity. “The plant is valuable,” said Isaac Kehimkar, deputy director at BNHS, who has written a book on wild flowers.

Such “synchronous flowering events” are also important for pollination, said Aparna Watve, an ecologist and professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Tuljapur.

The flower is fairly healthy at the national park, but the same cannot be said of other parts of the State where quarrying has affected its natural habitat. “The eco-system has been disturbed,” said Watve. “That affects the rest of the vegetation.”

Changed land-use patterns had impacted both the flora and the fauna, she said. While some of the varieties are threatened, none have been listed as endangered.

Though most varieties of the karvi have an average flowering cycle of nine to 12 years, stray flowers might bloom intermittently. Such “aberrant flowering”, said Kehimkar, could be a back-up mechanism in case normal flowering fails for some reason.

Next year, when the buds are dry and the seeds are scattered, the landscape will be permeated by loud popping sounds. “There’s a literal ‘pop pop pop’ sound you can hear,” he said. “It’s a mechanism for the plant to scatter the seeds as widely as possible.”

A visitor to the forest next year would be treated to the sound but not the sights. For now, it’s a time to rejoice. “Just like Japan which celebrates the cherry blossom festival, this is our humble way of celebrating the karvi ,” said Sathe, “It is just the beginning.”

Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based journalist

COMMENT NOW