Sacred Grove
2024
Looped film
 
A portrait of three gardens: the Nallur Tamarind Grove, Karnataka, India, the Derby Arboretum, UK and Lalbagh Botanic Garden, Bengaluru, India. Nallur was the first recognised biodiversity heritage site in India. A sacred grove of predominantly tamarind trees growing alongside neem, wood apple, banyan and Bombay ebony. Such wildernesses have been protected by Hindu indigenous communities, who built their villages around fragments of forest and lived alongside them for centuries. Nature holds deep spiritual meaning in the Hindu faith, where tree worship is part of religious practice and the collection of the flora and fauna from these wild places provide the source of Ayurvedic medicine for each community. This way of living in harmony with the trees has meant that areas of rich biodiversity, often home to rare and endangered plants, have existed for hundreds of years and remain today. The tamarind trees found in Nallur are thought to be over 400 years old. The Hindu community that once lived around this sacred grove has since been abandoned, leaving 278 tamarinds to grow in isolation, under a busy flight path, among the ancient ruins of a Hindu temple dating back to the 1300s.
 
Derby Arboretum was built in 1840 and was Britain’s first municipal park. It was designed as a botanical garden of trees, for the education and enjoyment of the Derby working class, gifted by a rich industrialist, Joseph Strutt. Many trees were brought from around the world and planted in the park, including a variety of horse chestnut and the cotoneaster tree from India. However, the garden suffered from the area becoming increasingly industrialised, the heavy pollution from surrounding factories killing many of the tree species. Today the garden remains open to the public with the few remaining original trees still growing.

Lalbagh Botanic Garden was first designed by the Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali, and completed by his son Tipu Sultan, in the style of Mughal Gardens, designed to emulate paradise. Tipu introduced many plants from across the world, curating the largest 18th century collection of rare species on the subcontinent. After the British conquest of the Kingdom of Mysore, the garden fell under the governance of the East India Company and Lalbagh was radically expanded with many more diverse species introduced. The East India Company used the garden for the advancement of Western botanical education. It became a space of inventory and categorisation, cultivating and transporting plants for large profits, in a form of ‘Plant Colonialism’. The impact of imperialism is still materially present in the gardens today, in the avenues and architecture of the park, but it remains a space of diverse, resilient nature in the centre of the Indian cosmopolitan metropolis of Bengaluru.