Note 87 — IV. CONCERNING INDIA THE LESS.[71]
Reading edition
The banyan:
“Such as at this day, to Indians known In Malabar or Decan, spreads her arms Branching so broad and long, that in the ground The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow About the mother-tree, a pillared shade High over-arched, and echoing walks between: There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat, Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds At loopholes cut through thicket shade.” (Paradise Lost, b. ix.)
Which noble lines are almost an exact versification of Pliny’s description (xii, 11). Drury quotes Roxburgh as mentioning banyans, the vertical shadow of which had a circumference of five hundred yards. Just about half this size is the largest I have seen, near Hushyárpúr in the Northern Punjab. It is remarkable in some of the largest of these trees, that you cannot tell which has been the original and “mother-tree,” that having probably decayed and disappeared. The age of these trees is sometimes by no means so great as first impressions suggest. There is a very fine one in the Botanic Garden at Calcutta, (its exact size I do not remember, but the shade is not less than a hundred and eighty to two hundred feet across), whereof the garden tradition runs, that it originated in Roxburgh’s time, i.e., eighty or ninety years ago. It has, however, been carefully tended and extended, the vertical fibres being protected by bamboo tubes when young. It is said to have grown originally in the crown of a date tree, as often happens.