essay on Chinar tree
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I have been to Istanbul, Prague and Iran and seen chinars or plane trees. Within India, even Nainital has them. But nowhere do they grow as majestic and spectacular as they do in the Kashmir Valley, where they dominate the landscape with their height, girth and the changing colour of their leaves with the passing of the seasons: that is something you will find nowhere else.
The British, inveterate tree planters, at once ‘got’ the point of planting the chinar. Of course, they did not have to hunt for a precedent. They merely followed the example of their forbearers, the Mughals, who are creditted with bringing the tree to the Valley (although the oldest chinar in the Valley predates the Mughals in Kashmir by a couple of centuries). The inexplicable part is that it is said to grow east of the Balkans, but in other countries where it does grow – I have personally seen it in Prague, Istanbul and Iran, it attains none of the proportions that it does in Kashmir. Why, even the “smouldering coal” parallel that is believed to have caused the name “che naar” (naar means fire in Farsi} is far more pronounced in Kashmir than in, say, Iran, where chinars are just as tall or short as any other tree and do not turn spectacularly red in the autumn