PLANT
Aranattukara's environmental group, started on 5 June 2000, which plants trees, spreads seeds and has catalogued the rare trees of the John Mathai Centre.
PLANT stands for Protect Leaf and Add Nature in Tropics. It began work in Aranattukara on 5 June 2000, World Environment Day.
Why it began
Aranattukara was once a green place of bamboo groves, mango and jack trees, coconut and areca palms, with the kol (low-lying paddy wetlands) close by and full of birds. As more buildings went up, much of that greenery disappeared, and many of the old kavus (sacred groves) survive only as names. A group of local doctors, teachers, an Ayurveda physician and a college botanist came together to do something about it.
What it does
Its first step was planting saplings around the neighbourhood. Members also collected the seeds of trees and flowering trees and, on trips out of town, scattered them with catapults along remote riverbanks and in places where forest had been cleared. The book says some of those trees now flower as far away as the banks of the Souparnika and Kodachadri.
PLANT has also numbered the rare trees at the Dr John Matthai Centre and prepared a botanical guide to them, which students still use. It still plants saplings to replace lost greenery.