It’s hard to refer to “a lonely palm tree” without sounding like redundant verse and cheap poetry. The excuse is that it is, in fact, the loneliest palm tree in the world, the last of its species in the wild. This is stated by a group of Indian botanists, who launched an awareness campaign last week, first of all among the neighbors of the Himalayas who are their guardian angels.
Any palm tree evokes exoticism, but Windamere’s also has its dose of poetry and glamour. Not in vain does it take its name from the garden of the colonial hotel where, 32 years ago, an expert from the Edinburgh Botanical Garden, Henry Noltie, believed he had found a rare species of palm tree.
Three years later, two fans of these trees – one German and the other British, Tobias and Martin – toured the Himalayas with the same eagerness with which Stanley searched for Livingstone in Africa, without losing sight of the Scot’s observation. They discovered that palm trees defined as unique in the rainiest India in the world were actually the same as those in Kathmandu. But when they arrived at midnight at the Darjeeling hotel, flashlight in hand, they were stunned.
But in daylight, even more so. That species of palm tree, in fact, had never been described. To rule out that it was a hybrid, they had to find it in the wild. They did it on their next trip, after months of exploration, thanks to the instructions of a native – at that end of Bengal sandwiched between Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan – named Victor Rai. There were about fifty specimens, spread across two nearby ravines.
Scientifically it was going to be called Trachycarpus latisectus, but popularly it was already the Windamere palm tree. One more, among the hundred Indian species, threatened since its discovery. Fifteen years later, the population had dropped to 28. Today, one remains. Hence the recent campaign by the Himalayan delegation of the Botanical Survey of India, surely when extinction is already predicted.
The only ray of hope is that we know where it is endemic, near Kalimpong, and in the meantime, thousands of seeds have spread among hobbyists on five continents. Capable of reaching twelve meters and growing at more than two thousand meters of altitude, it is also one of the most resistant to the cold, withstanding temperatures below zero. Several locals have managed to grow it in their gardens and have learned that the seeds have value, even if they are not the ones who resell them on the internet, for a price three hundred times higher.
Darjeeling gives its name to one of the most delicate teas in the world. But the Himalayan station was also the backwater where the colonial government ruled or pretended to rule the immensity of India during the hottest half of the year. Between March and April, half of the administration, as well as the wives and children of the officers, packed their bags in Calcutta for Darjeeling. Three quarters of a century later, when the capital moved to New Delhi, the procession headed to Simla.
The Windamere Hotel also has its pink history. When Sikkim was still independent, the crown prince went there to soak his sorrows. The misfortune of his ancestors ceding Darjeeling to British India, as well as his recent widowhood. In one of these sessions he met his Grace Kelly. A rich American twentysomething, named Hope Cooke, ultimately the niece of the ambassador to Iran. Three years later they were king and queen and appearing on People. Indira Gandhi smelled danger and looked for a way to annex Sikkim, today the least populated state in India. .
Many years before declaring that she would never go hungry again, Scarlett O’Hara, that is, the British actress Vivien Leigh, was born in Darjeeling, like her Anglo-Indian mother before her. The wind of history blew away the British, to bring more Nepalis. Also the Dalai Lama’s guerrilla brother, Gyalo Thondup, who spends his last years there before taking his secret dealings with Washington, Beijing and New Delhi to the grave, although some he already revealed in his memoirs, “The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong.”
(Below, photo of Hope Cooke with her husband, already queen consort and king of Sikkim. They both met at Windamere)
