The Araucaria columnaris, or the Cook pine, called the Christmas tree in India, grows well in Bengaluru, says Kiran Mehta of Lila Nursery in Santa Cruz West. The city’s climate is ideal for its growth, the production mainly occurring there. The trees can reach up to nearly 200 feet, but have a slow growth rate of one feet per year, and have short, mostly horizontal branches in whirls around their slender leaning trunk. The branches are lined with cord-like, horizontal branchlets which are covered with small, point-tipped, spirally arranged, overlapping leaves, needle-like when young, and triangular and scale-like as they age. For his nursery, Mehta sources the plants towards the end of November each year in preparation for Christmas season. Their sale drops significantly during the rest of the year, he says, as they become seasonally dated, and since artificial trees are cheaper and involve no maintenance, many still opt for them. “The live plant can’t be kept indoors indefinitely,” says Mehta. “When fed adequate sunlight and allowed to grow outside, it can survive for nearly a hundred years.”

Evergreens, apart from bearing the promise of life during winter, have also been believed in many countries to keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits and illness. As it has for centuries, the evergreen continues to symbolise human belief in renewed life and the hope that lives in all mankind. Amidst the pandemic and its collective experience of upheaval then, a switch, however minor, towards its natural form in interesting.