What am I looking at?
What looks like a woodland of separate trunks is one enormous banyan spreading laterally through a network of prop roots.
The quick answer
The Great Banyan is a banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis) located in Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, Shibpur, Howrah, near Kolkata, India. The great banyan tree draws more visitors to the garden than its collection of exotic plants from five continents. Its main trunk became infected by fungi after it was struck by two cyclones. In 1925, the main trunk was removed to keep the remainder of the tree healthy. A 330-metre-long (1,080 ft) road was built around its circumference, but the tree continues to spread beyond it.
How it came to be
Botanically known as Ficus benghalensis, and belonging to the family Moraceae, the tree is a native of India. The fruit is like a small fig and is eaten by some people. It also has a sweeter taste than fig. The banyan plant is sometimes observed growing from the little wet dust deposits on buildings because birds carry them around for eating. The fruit is red and becomes softer when ripe.
The detail most people miss
The Great Banyan tree is believed to be at least 250 years old, and has been referenced in many travel books, going back to at least the nineteenth century. Early travel writers found it to be noteworthy due to its large size and its unusually high number of prop-trunks. It has survived three great cyclones in 1864, 1867, and 2020 when some of its main branches were broken. With its large number of aerial roots, which grow from the branches and run vertically to the ground, The Great Banyan is said to appear more like a dense forest than as an individual tree.
Why it still matters
The tree survives without its main trunk, which decayed and had to be removed in 1925. A monument has been constructed to the dead trunk near the tree's center, but the marker is hardly accessible to visitors, who rarely venture within the tree's thick inner tangle of roots and branches. Visitors generally prefer to access only the perimeter of the tree. The area occupied by the tree is about 18,918 square metres (about 1.89 hectares or 4.67 acres). The present crown of the tree has a circumference of 486 m (1,594 ft) and the highest branch rises to 24.5 m (80 ft); it has at present 3772 aerial roots reaching down to the ground as prop roots. Its height is almost equivalent to the Gateway of India.
Look closer
Sambamurty, A.V.S.S. (2005), Taxonomy Of Angiosperms, I.K. International Publishing House Pvt. Limited, ISBN 9788188237166
