Saalumarada is known as a folk hero in her home area because, when she was a teenage girl, she planted her first Banyan tree just outside the remote Indian village of Hulikal in south western state of Karnataka. She was illiterate, but had green fingers, and enjoyed the planting of the tree and watching it grow. Though Saalumarada was born into poverty and married very young, she had not fallen pregnant. There was a local folk tradition that if a childless woman planted a Banyan tree, the national tree of India, she would be rewarded with a child. She did not conceive a child, but she continued to plant up to 380 Banyan trees, watering them daily, and creating a 28 km tree lined avenue near her village. To add to this, she planted another 8,000 trees of different kinds. For this, she was granted the highest civilian honour, the Padma Shri Award in 2019 when she was almost 100 years old.
To acknowledge Saalumarada’s vast age and her wonderful ecology work, a dance company is bringing publicity of her work in a performance called, A Tree in Time. The dance company director, Shantha Rao, went to the village to find her. After some difficulty, she met her. Her hands were wizened and gnarled like the trees themselves and had never written her name but Saalumarada planted trees from the time she was a young girl until she could not do the heavy work any longer.
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