Mario Bautista
As many as 400 endemic plant species from across the country will be preserved in the newly developed botanical garden in Mundhawa, said officials.
The garden is being developed by the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) on over 44.5 acres of land owned by the organisation.
The plant species have great significance in the flora of India and their preservation in the garden will help researchers, students as well as the conservationist to study the endemic plant biodiversity across the country, said experts.
A Benniamin, scientist and head of office, said, “In the BSI office premises in the Koregaon Park area, we have planted some endemic and rare species. Now we are taking up the plantation on a bigger scale, hence the garden is being developed at Mundhwa. Researchers, students, and conservationists would certainly benefit from the botanical garden.”
BSI, the apex taxonomic research organisation of the country, has its western regional centre in Pune. The centre leads florist explorations in the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot region, along with the Western Coast of India covering the entire states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Goa.
Over the years scientists have visited various locations in these states, and collected data on the plant species including native plants, rare plant species etc. The BSI also created a repository of thousands of plant species on the premises of their office in Koregaon Park.
From the research, the scientists also discovered new plant species. However, over the years, they realised that due to various reasons, some native plant species have reached the verge of extinction and to conserve such species, the scientist planned to conserve those species by planting them in their premises. With this, an idea came up to develop a new botanical garden in a larger area and accordingly a bigger garden is being created in Mundhawa.
The newly developing garden will house at least 500 endemic species from the western ghat region. Among them, at least 50 species belong to Maharashtra.
Apart from that some other species that are being planted in this garden include magnificent nutmeg (Myristica magnifica Bedd) which is endangered, a blistering varnish tree (Holigarna grahamii (Wight) Kurz) – native to India, a blackboard tree (Alestonia Venenata R. BR.) – native to south India, wild nutmeg (Kmema Attenuata Warb.) – endemic to India and syzygium stockssi (Duthie) Gamble, another plant native to southern and western India.
The plant species also includes floral plants including archids. Earlier the BSI scientists discovered many archids plant species in western ghat. In Pune too there are many varieties of archid flowers and are located in various places in Maval tehsil. However, the increased human interference is posing a big threat to such species and hence, some archid plants are also being planted in the new garden.
