An illustrated kingdom of real fantastical plants Nirupa Rao
I have a challenge for you.
The next time you’re stuck in traffic,
take a minute to take a look
at the sea of cars around you.
How many car companies
do you think you could recognize?
I’m not even really into cars,
but I think I’d do fairly well.
But then look beyond the cars
to the trees that line
the side of the road.
How many of those could you identify?
Probably not as many, right?
Year upon year,
we grow further and further
away from nature
to the point where we have to question:
What experience of nature
will the next generation have?
And if that generation lacks
a sort of emotional connection
with their surroundings,
then will they bother to fight and save it
when we need it most?
My name is Nirupa Rao,
and I’m a botanical artist.
In short, that means I paint plants,
usually with watercolor,
in a way that aims to be not only
aesthetically appealing
but also scientifically accurate.
And I’m well aware
that this is quite an odd profession
for a 21st-century urban Indian –
some might say outdated
in the age of the camera –
but here’s how my journey began.
A few years ago,
I met two naturalists who work
with the Nature Conservation Foundation:
Divya Mudappa and T.R. Shankar Raman.
And now interestingly,
they actually began their careers
working with animals,
but they soon came to realize
that if they were
to protect those animals,
they’d also have to protect
their habitats –
that is, the trees they live off.
And so they started a rainforest
restoration program
aimed at growing local trees
that local birds and animals rely on.
And they were looking to visually
document them in some way,
but the photographers they approached
came up empty-handed.
These trees were up to 140 feet tall.
That’s 26 times my height.
Try capturing giants like that
in a single camera frame.
Besides, the surrounding greenery
was just too dense
to clearly isolate a single tree.
And so together, we decided
to give good old painting a shot.
And to tell you the truth,
even when I was standing there
right in front of them,
it was difficult to see the entire tree.
So instead I’d study
the buttress up close
and then climb up the hill to see
its crown rising above the canopy.
And then with Divya,
and she there as aide,
we could piece these pieces
of the puzzle together
into the final painting.
For a lot of people
who don’t know the jungles
as well as these naturalists,
these paintings are the only way
that they’ll get to see these trees
in their entirety.
We were able to document
30 of the region’s most iconic species
along with their fruit, flowers,
seeds and leaves.
(Applause)
Through this process,
the jungles really came alive to me.
They morphed from this
undifferentiated sea of green
into individual species
with individual characters.
And I think a lot of people just tend
to see plants as background scenery,
assuming that their immobility
makes them uninteresting.
But I began to see that it is that very
rootedness that makes them fascinating,
the ingenious ways in which
they adapt and respond
to threats and opportunities
on timescales that make
our heads hurt to imagine.
And I couldn’t help but wonder:
What if I could tell their stories,
showcase their complexity?
Perhaps we’d all start to think of plants
a little differently.
And in fact, in my family, plants
have always been a source of fascination.
My grand-uncle, Father Cecil Saldanha,
was the first to document the flora
of our home state of Karnataka
back in the ’60s.
And my mother has all of these memories
of being a little girl watching
this entire enterprise unfold.
And consequently,
I’ve come to associate plants
with adventure and discovery
and excitement.
And so I knew I didn’t just want
to paint roses and sunflowers.
I wanted to paint the kinds of plants
that botanists like my uncle work with.
And so I set out to create a book,
supported by the National
Geographic Society,
on the weirdest, wackiest
plants we could find
in one of the most biodiverse
regions in the world:
India’s very own Western Ghats.
(Applause)
Take a look at these fantastic
jewel-like sundews.
They grow in regions where nutrient
content in the soil is poor,
and so they have a little way
of supplementing their diets.
They lure, trap and ingest insects
using mucilaginous glands on their leaves.
The little insects are attracted
to the sweet secretions,
but once they come in contact,
they are ensnared and the game is up.
And you might notice
that the sundews very cleverly hold
their flowers on tall, thin stems
high above their murderous leaves
to avoid trapping potential pollinators.
Further inside the jungle,
you might meet the strangler fig.
It grows in areas where sunlight is scant
and competition is intense.
And so it has a strategy
to sort of cut in line and get ahead.
You see, its seeds are dispersed by birds
that drop them atop the branches
of existing trees.
And that little seed will start
to germinate from there,
sending its shoots upward to the sky
and its roots all the way
down to the ground,
all the while strangling
the host tree, often to death.
And even if that host tree
dies and rots away,
the strangler will persist
as a hollowed-out column
of roots and branches.
And if that didn’t impress you,
let me show you one
of my personal favorites:
the Neelakurinji.
When it blossoms,
it does so in unison,
covering entire hillsides
in carpets of blue.
This is its pollination strategy
known as “gregarious flowering,”
in which it invests all of its resources
into a single, spectacular event
aimed at attracting
pollinators to the feast –
which is easily done,
considering the Neelakurinji
is all that can be seen for miles around.
But here’s the catch:
it happens only once every 12 years.
(Applause)
And soon after seeding,
these flowers will die,
not to be seen again
for the next 12 years.
This is our way of telling a story
of the Western Ghats:
through plants and through
their ecosystems
and the various ways
in which they interact
with players in their habitats.
It’s glorious, isn’t it?
But the way things are going,
we can’t be sure that the Neelakurinji
will come out to play again
in the next 12 years.
The further and further
we grow from nature,
the more we are almost
literally blind to it
and the effects that
our activities have on it.
And that’s what it’s called –
“plant blindness”:
the increasing inability
to really register the plants around us
as living beings.
The two scientists that coined this term,
Elisabeth Schussler and James Wandersee,
contend that plants lack
certain visual cues.
They don’t have faces,
they don’t move,
and we don’t perceive them as threats.
And so with the increasing onslaught
of information that our eyes receive,
we just deprioritize registering plants,
simply filtering out information
that we view as extraneous.
But stop to think about that.
Are plants really extra?
Are they just nature’s backdrop?
Or are they the fundamental
building blocks
upon which all life is based,
the starting points of our ecosystems
and the reason why earth
is sustainable for life to this day?
I leave you with these images
from a program called “Wild Shaale,”
which in Kannada means “wild school.”
It’s run by a conservationist,
Krithi Karanth.
And her team turned
some of my illustrations
into games that village children
could play with and learn from.
And I can tell you they were so excited
to see plants that they recognized –
the trees that the monkeys play on,
the flowers they use
at their harvest festival,
the fruit they use to wash their hair.
And it’s that sort of familiarity
which, when celebrated,
turns to love,
which then turns into an urge to protect.
It’s really time we open our eyes
to the world around us,
to this entire kingdom
that’s hidden in plain sight.
And so the next time
you’re stuck in traffic,
you know what to do.
(Applause)