Trees Of India

Sixty of the most popular trees in India are selected and clear pictures and descriptions of each are provided.

Part of the 'WWF-OUP Nature Guides' series, Trees of India discusses forty-three tree species, most of which can be commonly found in India. Pippa Mukherjee's detailed descriptions, complemented by colour illustrations of the tree and its leaves, fruits, and flowers, reveal the unique characteristics and uses of a wide variety of trees found in India.

This is a book about religious conceptions of trees within the cultural world of tree worship at the tree shrines of northern India. Sacred trees have been worshipped for millennia in India and today tree worship continues there among all segments of society. In the past, tree worship was regarded by many Western anthropologists and scholars of religion as a prime example of childish animism or decadent ''popular religion.'' More recently this aspect of world religious cultures is almost completely ignored in the theoretical concerns of the day. David Haberman hopes to demonstrate that by seriously investigating the world of Indian tree worship, we can learn much about not only this prominent feature of the landscape of South Asian religion, but also something about the cultural construction of nature as well as religion overall. The title People Trees relates to the content of this book in at least six ways. First, although other sacred trees are examined, the pipal-arguably the most sacred tree in India-receives the greatest attention in this study. The Hindi word ''pipal'' is pronounced similarly to the English word ''people.''Second, the ''personhood'' of trees is a commonly accepted notion in India. Haberman was often told: ''This tree is a person just like you and me.'' Third, this is not a study of isolated trees in some remote wilderness area, but rather a study of trees in densely populated urban environments. This is a study of trees who live with people and people who live with trees. Fourth, the trees examined in this book have been planted and nurtured by people for many centuries. They seem to have benefited from human cultivation and flourished in environments managed by humans. Fifth, the book involves an examination of the human experience of trees, of the relationship between people and trees. Haberman is interested in people's sense of trees. And finally, the trees located in the neighborhood tree shrines of northern India are not controlled by a professional or elite class of priests. Common people have direct access to them and are free to worship them in their own way. They are part of the people's religion. Haberman hopes that this book will help readers expand their sense of the possible relationships that exist between humans and trees. By broadening our understanding of this relationship, he says, we may begin to think differently of the value of trees and the impact of deforestation and other human threats to trees.

The Book of Indian Trees brings the reader, in one title, descriptions of more than 150 species of trees that the scientist, the conservationist and the nature enthusiast would come across in India and the rest of the Subcontinent.

• Contains descriptions of 988 Trees belonging to 87 families. • Has 568 pages, 255 black and white photographs and 193 line drawings of Trees. • Separate photographs provided for the Evergreen, Deciduous, Scrub and Mangrove Trees. • Sacred, Rare, Endemic, Ornamental, Fruit-bearing, Littoral Trees are tabulated. • Contains Maps of Forests of South India and Western and Eastern Ghats. • This book is brought out after a gap of more than a century after Bourdillon’s The Forest Trees of Travancore (1908). • The book is also equally useful wherever Tropical Evergreen, Deciduous and Scrub Forests exist in Peninsular India.