The unusual coconut

Unperturbed by the cleaning and screening for the French president, the Buddha’s Coconut has for years braved Chandigarh’s cold winter wind and fog.

Written by Jaskiran Kapoor

Chandigarh | January 24, 2016 10:49 AM IST

3 min read

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Buddha’s Coconut Tree in Sector 17 of Chandigarh. Express Photo by Kamleshwar Singh

When French President François Hollande drives into the Taj Hotel Sunday, he may or may notice a particular species of tree just outside the premises with shiny green leaves and laden with small, woody, nut-like fruit. Confusingly named Buddha’s Coconut, the tree looks nothing like a palm. It is a native of South-East Asia, and in India, found mostly in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. So what is it doing in Chandigarh? In keeping with the city’s appetite for trees from other places, Buddha’s Coconut is here for no other reason than that it looks pretty.

Unperturbed by the cleaning and screening for the French president, the Buddha’s Coconut has for years braved Chandigarh’s cold winter wind and fog. While many other trees have shed their leaves by this time and are waiting for spring to arrive to sprout green shoots on their branches, the leaves on the Buddha’s Coconuts remain a shiny dark green throughout. And while this evergreen flowers in February-March, it is right now showing off brown fruit hanging in bunches. One peculiarity about the tree is that the leaves all look different, even on the same tree.

For this reason, it is also nicknamed ‘mad tree’, or in Bengali, ‘pagla gachh’. Sterculia alata or Pterygota alata, the Buddha’s Coconut or Tula tree belongs to the Sterculiaceae family and can be spotted on the boundary walls of Park Plaza and Hotel Taj in Sector 17, and the V5 roads of sectors 5, 14 and 34. They were lined up gracefully, these large deciduous trees with a smooth grey bark opposite KC Cinema in Sector 17, but were axed to make way for the flyover. Sterculius comes from Roman mythology, the god of manure, and Buddha’s Coconut also goes by the name Tropical Chestnuts.

Columnar with a cylindrical trunk, it has been planted in Chandigarh as an ornamental avenue tree.

Its oil and wood, however, do come in handy for those who use it. The seeds are consumed, while the plant is used medicinally. Although there is no story behind its name, horticultural experts say it gets the title from the shape of the fruit.

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