Just orchidding

March is the month when forests are cleared and burnt for shifting cultivation. Close to Itanagar town, there are lot of fires; when interviewed on radio, the Forest Department kept announcing that people out there who go for picnic and throw their lit ciggarettes are mostly to blame. They have to make sure that they put off their ciggarettes when they dispose them.

I've been to these hills a few times; no one goes there for a picnic, all the beer-drinkers and ciggarette-smokers are right here in town. The fires are largely due to shifting cultivation. The people cultivating in these forests are those who have moved in from other villages to be closer to towns and they practice a distorted form of shifting cultivation. This kind of cultivation is distinctly different from that practised in remote villages in arunachal. While in remote villages, farmers let a cultivated patch recover for several years, often for a decade, here a patch is recultivated within 2–3 years.

The other day we took a walk in these forests and saw a big tree fallen to the ground with quite a few orchids still clinging on. My friend took two of them and I took one back. When we returned we put them in buckets with moist sand and within few days the orchid I brought back looked healthy. Then, we hoisted it up to a mango tree in our institute compound and just about two weeks later, its flowering, possibly Dendrobium species!