While working on my book, The Jungle Trees of Central India, I was hopping from jungle to jungle trying to discover the trees there.

During these trips I discovered a tree that I connected to instantly because of the smell of its flowers. I remembered the smell very clearly. When I smelt it, something went, Shazam! This was a smell from when I was eleven or twelve. You know, smells can be so evocative.

It turned out to be something called a Stereospermum, what they call a Padar in certain parts of Central India. The Padar has these pink, sticky flowers. I’d never noticed the flower, even when I had smelt it as a child; never had actually looked up for the source of the smell. It’s an extremely individual smell, almost sickly sweet. Some people don’t like the smell. And yet, it was strange to have this tree go ‘I’m here again!’ after a gap of forty years or whatever…it was just very, very shocking to me. I came across this tree in a meadow in Pachmarhi. It turned out to be so isolated that it never produced any fruit, because there’s no other tree of the species around and there’s no cross pollination. It was a small tree and I wondered if this was its true size, or if it had a bigger avatar.

Subsequently, when I set out to do this book, I suddenly discovered not one, but maybe 200 of the Padars, some of them six times bigger than the one I had discovered earlier. I then discovered, quite quickly, that there are two species of Stereospermum—one with pink flowers and the other with yellow flowers. It’s a very interesting flower. It’s sort of bell-like in shape, extremely hairy and viscid, in the sense that it has these huge droplets that are produced at the end of ‘hairs.’ When you touch it, it’s really sticky. I’d not managed to find the yellow flowered tree.

Then I was travelling through a very dense part of the Kanha core area (outside the tourist zone) in the season that you might expect to find the yellow flowers. I was telling the guide that, for me, it was as important as sighting a leopard or a tiger. We did one trip and we found one tree with a few fallen flowers. But the tree was so tall and so high up that there was no question of getting to it. Then I came back to the area about three weeks later and there was the tree…many trees, in fact, at climbable height, photographable height, so finally I got my leopard and tiger. Wherever I go travelling now if I see a Stereospermum, it arrests me. I’ll recognize the tree even if it’s completely leafless, just by its form, the way the branches are arranged.

Pradip Krishen is a filmmaker, naturalist, environmentalist and author. He has been involved in the rewilding at Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park near Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. He is the author of Trees of Delhi: A Field Guide, and The Trees of Central India.