Terrace of trees: A Panaji man & his little green friends

Daniel D’Souza was only a student when he was admiring paintings at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery and happened to ask for the price of one. The response he got appalled him. “Not everything under the sun is meant for everyone.” These words made him take a good, hard look at his love for bonsai and decide to never say never to anyone who was keen on learning the art but didn’t have enough money to pay for the tuition fee.
D’Souza speaks volubly about how a lot more needs to be done to fill the gap in environment degradation. He is not speaking of global warming, melting icecaps but about Goa and Panaji. His efforts, along with the Corporation of the City of Panjim at “Re-Greening Panjim” sometime in 2000 yielded a greener city, from Altinho to St Inez and trees planted along main boulevards in a city that he was born in.
D’Souza has earned the informal moniker ‘green man of Goa’, and more specifically, some attribute him rightly as the ‘Bonsai Man’. During 1988-89, at just 14 , he won his first prize for his passion at a plant show of the Botanical Society of Goa. “At my last show with the Botanical Society of Goa, I bagged 17 of the 21 prizes,” he says.
D’Souza was also in charge of gardens while at the Corporation of the City of Panaji, including all the gardens and open spaces, right from the entry point of Panaji, to the Raj Bhavan at Dona Paula.
This environment lover has a unique theory about the birth of bonsais. He believes India could have been responsible for the art. How? “The rishis and yogis knew about the medicinal value of certain trees and plants, but found it difficult to carry samples of such flora with them as they travelled across varied topographies,” he says. “Somewhere along their journeys, they likely stumbled upon or researched about carrying the plant — lock, stock and bark — with them. They figured how to grow plants in a pot and move about. The knowledge of ‘trees in a pot’ then probably travelled to China and during travels and wars, warriors and soldiers exchanged notes. It finally reached Japan and the masters took over, documenting and setting standards and styles of growing bonsais.”
D’Souza’s trigger to popularize bonsai started at 14, when his father gifted him a virtual do-it-yourself book. It helped greatly that he ‘tinkered’ with plants since he was four, what with his mother indulging his child-like experiments and discoveries in the garden. It is fascinating to revel in the knowledge that he offer. “There are 14 ‘styles’ of bonsai; a straight tree, a cascading tree, a natural growth, a nature-scarred tree (hit by lightning, cyclones), among others. Bonsais are grown and measured across heights, ranging from five centimetres to anywhere between 12 and 15 feet. They have a set of criteria, standardized and presided over by the Japanese bonsai masters. You can’t just clobber a full-grown tree into a pot and hang a bonsai name plate around it. The criteria state that it should have small leaves (for an apt parallel, take a mango or a banyan tree and now think about growing either of these to its full glory, but only in a pot), the bonsai has to have a long life, should withstand wiring and pruning (soft, metal wires are used to give bonsais a specific shape), and needs to have a strong root system and branches, just that you might not fund any to hang a swing from.”
We might not have understood how to grow mini-pigeons or mini-rabbits, but with bonsais, the trees’ physiology remains intact. It’s just that they are prodded to fit into a pot. D’Souza says bonsais need nurturing and care. “It’s probably the only living art form. Bonsais need extra nutrients, frequent soil-change, and not a single discouraging word or unfair comparisons,” he points out.
D’Souza’s terrace garden — where he practices and conducts monthly classes for students and enthusiasts — has all the tell-tale signs of monk-like dedication to bonsais. There’s a bougainvillea tree, a banyan tree with hanging roots, those familiar pine trees that grow along Miramar beach and are much sought after during Christmas, and even a tamarind tree — all in pots. He enjoys the fruits of his long years with the bonsais, drawing a humorous parallel with his own children who are far younger than them. He’s had lemon sherbet from his creations, full-sized chikoos, mangoes, pomegranates, guavas and tamarinds.