Banyan

The banyan’s Sanskrit are names — bahupada, ‘the one with many feet’ and nyagrodha, ‘the down-grower’. It is also, a kind of strangler fig that grows from another tree, usually from the a fork in the tree, or rotten piles of leaves, strangling that tree out and expanding outward in long branches that drop and sink to the ground like fingers jointed and climbing against a wall.

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It is a type of fig or ficus tree native to the Indian sub-continent.

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Banyans grow long as their branches extend into the ground to produce more trunks. The longest covers 14.7 acres in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. One tree can almost appear as an entire forest. Of the many myths where initiation is engaged beneath a tree: odin who hung from a tree for nine days, Buddha who reached enlightenment beneath a tree, Moses who spoke with a burning tree,  Hindus say a banyan tree is the one Krishna stood beneath when he delivered the sermon of the Bhagavad Gita. These are more than places of contemplation, but divine action.

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Like all figs, this banyan has an ancient relationship with its pollinating wasps, who burrow within its small red figs.