Tag: Celosia argentea
The marvelous day when nothing kept happening
During the pandemic national parks were closed for more than a year. When we could finally get to one at the end of October 2021, The Family said, “Two years without a tiger sighting! I hope we see one now.” She wasn’t amused when I pointed out the butterfly called glassy tiger flitting from flower to flower in front of us.
Half an hour after we’d entered the park, we were driving along a deserted path when a pack of dhole (Cuon alpinus, wild dogs) came loping down it and halted our jeep. I’d never got a good photo of one, and now there were twenty, including cubs, happily playing in front of us, and enjoying each others’ company. I don’t think I’ll ever see that again. Perhaps it was the long absence of humans which had made them fearless. We spent a half hour or more watching a sight rarer than tigers before they let us move.
We moved on from a dirt path winding between trees, to an open meadow. I love the way the landscape changes in these jungles; you move from the dark, shut in, jungle to open meadows in the blink of an eye. In the distance I could see chital grazing; an egret on the back of one was like a little pennant bobbing up and down. I took the photo of a blade of grass that you see in the featured photo.
The path led on into the jungle again and we left the chital behind us for a while. But then they must have caught a whiff of a predator. There was an alarm call, and the herd came crashing through the jungle. A male stopped in a clear patch to assess us for danger, the light perfect for a shot of its panic stricken gaze. But chital (Axis axis, spotted deer) are notorious for being easy to spook. There was no sign of a tiger. Normally you would wait for a monkey or a sambar to verify that alarm call. There was none.
We lingered near that clearing. There was a trickle of water and that is always a good place to wait to see what comes along. A bunch of babblers first, and then some bulbuls (Pycnonotus cafer) came for a drink. I tried to get a photo of the droplets of water flung around as they took a dip in the stream and then shook themselves dry.
On, then, to a place where the jungle was less thick. Two other jeeps were waiting here. “Alarm call,” one of the drivers told us, and we joined them in a silent vigil as the horizon slid up towards the sun. We were standing under a growth of teak (Tectona grandis). I admired the sunlight through the large leaves, the texture of the peeling bark, the play of light on grass. In normal life I would never spend ninety minutes sitting so still, my mind only in the moment. Whether or not you see a tiger in the jungle, you see the world in such detail that you never forget it later. These are the times that I love.
Perhaps there was no tiger there. Or maybe it had hunkered down and decided to wait us out. Time is never on our side. The light was beginning to go. In an hour we would not be able to see the tiger even if it stood up and walked past us. I took a photo of the field of silver cockscomb (Celosia argentea) near us, spider webs threaded through the field as the predator of the small world waited as patiently for its prey as a tiger.
Just before we moved on, a sambar buck (Rusa unicolor) came through the woods, browsing. It caught a whiff of us in the breeze, and stopped to look at us. Deer are always alert, but unlike a chital, a sambar will not be spooked by its own shadow. It stood still enough that I could take a photo of it even in this failing light.
As we moved away, there was only one other large animal that we saw. That’s the gaur (Bos gaurus, Indian bison) that you see in the photo above. I have a bone to pick with them. They are diurnal, and they could easily overturn a jeep if they wanted to. Why then do they appear only in bad light? When we entered the jungle we’d read a large friendly notice put up by the forest department, “Don’t enter the jungle in a search of a tiger. If you don’t see one you’ll go back and say you saw nothing.” This was a good day seeing nothing, I told The Family.
Plumed cockscomb
Celosia argentea, silver cockscomb, is a common weed. I see it often on trips out of town, and sometimes even in abandoned places in Mumbai. I’ve written about it many times earlier. If you want to see one of those, then you could try the most detailed post. But this post is not about the weed. It is about its descendant, which finds its place in many gardens: the plumed cockscomb, the same species.
It always amazes me how much variety hobbyists can coax out of plants. In the wild the flowers come in shades of white or pink, so getting a bright red out of it may just be a matter of selectively culling and breeding over generations. Not easy, but straightforward, once you set your mind to it. But transforming it into the grotesque plumes you see in the featured photo is perhaps due to chance. The genome of the plant clearly has that potential. But seeing it would have been luck, followed by the patient hard work of fixing that mutation into a stable germ line. Just thinking of it tires me out.
Kurdu
Silver cockscomb, (Celosia argentea, called Kurdu कुर्दु in Marathi) is a flower which I photograph every monsoon. There are often whole fallow fields around villages full of these flowers fluttering and dancing in the breeze. When I think of the Sahyadris in the monsoon, this is what flashes on my inward eye. Every year is slightly different. This year I found a couple of fully developed blooms in that spike. And this year I also found that the leaves of this annual plant are edible. I should try it when I find it on a farm next year.
Silver cockscomb
Silver cockscomb (Celosia argentea) is a common weed. I must have seen it since I was a child, but my first clear memory of it is rather recent. It dates from about two decades ago, when I began to haunt scrublands around Mumbai and in the Sahyadris in search of butterflies. The spiky inflorescences attracted several large and colourful nymphalids, and eventually I began to photograph the flower. In recent months, after the end of the monsoon, I’ve noticed it wherever I go: Mumbai and the Sahyadris of course, but also the edge of the Thar desert, in Bera, and in the central Indian plains, in and around the Tadoba national park. I’ll have to look for it further east in coming years. I’m certain I’ll find it there, because it is considered to be as much of a weed in China as well. It is invasive, having originated in the tropical regions of Africa.
Open patches in the jungle were completely overrun with this flower. I find it quite strange that the widely grown garden plant, the cockscomb, is the same species, usually called Celosia argentea var. cristata. How many generations of selective breeding must have gone into creating those showy flowers! I always found the velvety curls of the garden flower faintly repulsive. I like the clean lines of the original wild stock much more attractive.
I stared at a patch of these flowers while everyone around me wasted their time scanning the jungle for a glimpse of the tiger. I love these tiger safaris; the herd of tourists act as lookouts, and their alarm calls are easy to recognize. I can leave the spotting to them and concentrate on these other aspects of the surroundings. The flower bearing stalks rose perhaps a little above knee high, certainly less than a meter tall, but high enough to make the flowers the first thing that a pollinator would spot from far. The bodies of the plant are visible in the photo above.
Historically in India the plant has been eaten when times are hard, and in parts of India it finds regular use as food. It is used traditionally to treat various ailments, including as an anti-parasitic agent. The literature on isolating medically active molecules from the plant is too large to quote here. Interestingly, there have been recent studies in using the plant to suck up heavy metal pollutants (manganese, cadmium, copper) from contaminated soil. This ability to quickly accumulate poisons should make it less attractive as a vegetable. Perhaps this is the reason its use as food persists only in remote places which may not have seen much industrial pollution of the soil. Not being prone to eating random plants, I’m happy to explore waste ground where I see these flowers.
Monsoon flowers
The Sahyadris come alive with flowers in the late monsoon. As we get ready for a weekend in the Kaas plateau, I decided to look again at the wild flowers I’d photographed when we were lost between Dolkhamb and Kasara about a month ago. I took out my newly acquired three-volume set of the flowers of the Sahyadris and decided that I must identify all the photos I have.
The easiest to identify is the Silver Cockscomb, called kombda in Marathi, whose binomial is Celosia argentea. Many years ago, when I first started to take macro photos, I’d noticed this as a plant which attracts many kinds of butterflies. I could wait by a patch in any open piece of land, and I would definitely get a few satisfactory shots of butterflies. Unfortunately, mid-August is too early in the season for butterflies. There are lots of other pollinators around, but the colourful Lepidoptera of the Sahyadris emerge a month later. So this time I only have a photo of the blossom (featured image).
The purple flowers in the background took me a while to identify. It was called Murdannia wightii in a checklist prepared in 1965, and gets into the field guide of the flowers of the Sahyadris under this name. But the website of the Botanical Survey of India says that it is more properly called by the name Murdannia pauciflorum since it was identified as such in 1892. No common name is recorded, not even in Marathi. There were so many of these in fallow fields that I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t have a local name.
The common Balsam was a flower that I knew well when I was a child. My gradparents’ garden always had a patch of these in some corner. Over the years I’d forgotten it. Then in August I saw whole hillsides covered with these lovely purple flowers. Bees buzzed among them. I knew I should have been able to name them. Eventually, I resorted to asking an aunt, and got an instant identification.
An identification which really bothered me was these tiny flowers which I saw growing in the shade of some trees in a rocky patch of land next to a rice field. I’m not certain yet that it is indeed Blumea mollis, but that’s the closest I have got. I’ll keep looking, and if I find a better identification I’ll come back and change it. But for the moment I let it stand.
Don't hold your breath 
