For the last few weeks many of the volunteers have been busy with painting new forest plaques with information about some of our tree species.
Here in Sadhana Forest we are growing a Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest, and this ecosystem type consists of over 160 species. Most of these are evergreen species including trees, shrubs and climbers. Each species is unique and most have really interesting uses, some even medicinal. We want to share this information about the species with our volunteers and visitors so we decided to put plaques next to some of our trees and seedlings with information about the particular species.
We designed the plaques to include the latin name, tamil name and english name, followed by some information about the uses, medicinal or edible properties, or cultural significance of each species. As we are living in Tamil Nadu the information is written in Tamil first, then English. The 36 plaques are 2 feet high.
Our wonderful volunteers need to be thanked individually! Liza has been co-odinating the painting of the information in English, and Sujatha and Mahesh have been translating and painting the Tamil. Lisa and Alexa have been getting very artistic and painting an image of the actual leaf and fruit of each species on the boards which really finish them off beautifully! And thanks to all the others who have been helping a lot including Hannah, Mara, Chelsea and Rachel.
Every Friday at 4.30pm we take our visitors and volunteers on a tour of our forest, and these plaques will give them the opportunity to learn a little more about the trees we are planting, and add a splash of colour from the community to the forest. Can’t wait to get them in the ground!
