Mogra or Jasmine

Come summer and the lanes around the peths of Pune often hear the cry of 'mogra ala mogra!' The voice usually belongs to a man with a pushcart filled to the brim with white fragrant jasmine flowers for sale.

Ladies love this flower for making garlands or 'gajra' which they wind around their plaited hair.

The specimen here is slightly different with longer petals than those normally on the flowers that are sold. It is a variety of climber mogra.

It is one of life's little pleasures to enjoy a cup of tea in the morning with the sweet smelling mogra plant in bloom.

A windfall of seeds

Pre-monsoon showers are glorious stuff...cool drizzle, cloudy skies, occasional gusts of wind that bend trees in all directions. The outcome is a quantity of seed pods, leaves, and flowers fallen on the ground.

Here are some of the pods I picked up on such a recent occasion. Such diversity in shape, size and weight. Each one must have a separate dispersal strategy based on its unique features. The longest seed pod (dark and rod shaped) is of cassia or laburnum and measured more than 1.5 feet. The smallest one is of tamarind and is barely 1 inch across. Then there are the flat papery seeds from monkey biscuit tree. The two beanlike seeds are from Pongamia (karanj).