In the middle of many Hindu courtyards stands a small raised planter, often painted and sometimes shaped like a little shrine, with a bushy green plant growing out of it. Every morning someone waters it, and every evening someone lights a lamp beside it. For the family it is the oldest resident of the house.
Hindus have never drawn a hard line between the sacred and the growing. Trees are worshipped, leaves are offered, grass is laid at the feet of a god. This reverence is woven into scripture and daily practice, and it carries a quiet ecological wisdom. Here are the plants you are most likely to meet in a Hindu home or temple, and what each one means.
Tulsi: the plant that is a goddess
Tulsi (holy basil) is not merely sacred to Vishnu; she is regarded as a goddess in her own right and addressed as Tulsi Mata or Vrinda Devi. The Puranas tell her story. Vrinda was the wife of the asura Jalandhara, and so devoted to her husband and to Vishnu that her virtue made him invincible. When Jalandhara threatened the gods, Vishnu took his form and deceived her, and her protection was broken. Discovering the trick, Vrinda cursed Vishnu to become a stone, the shaligram, and gave up her life. Vishnu, moved by her devotion, declared that she would be born as the tulsi plant and that he would never accept an offering without her leaf.
Every year on the twelfth day of the bright half of Kartik, families celebrate Tulsi Vivah, her marriage to Vishnu in the form of a shaligram or an image of Krishna. The planter is decorated with sugarcane and marigolds, a tiny wedding is conducted and sweets are shared; in many regions this day opens the wedding season.
Daily care is simple and has been done the same way for centuries. Water is offered in the morning, usually after bathing and before eating, with a short prayer and a circling of the plant; in the evening a lamp is lit beside her. Leaves are plucked with the right hand and a word of permission, never at night and, in many families, not on Sundays or Ekadashi. They are essential in any offering to Vishnu or Krishna. Vaishnavas wear tulsi beads and use a tulsi mala for japa, and Ayurveda prizes the plant for coughs and fevers.
Peepal: the tree with its roots in heaven
The peepal (Ficus religiosa) is called ashvattha in Sanskrit, and the Bhagavad Gita opens its fifteenth chapter with it:
They speak of an imperishable ashvattha with its roots above and its branches below, whose leaves are the Vedic hymns; one who knows it knows the Vedas.
The tree is an image of the universe, growing downwards from its root in the divine. In the tenth chapter Krishna says simply, "Among trees I am the ashvattha." Under a peepal at Bodh Gaya, Siddhartha Gautama sat down and rose as the Buddha, which is why the same tree is honoured across Buddhist Asia as the Bodhi tree.
Hindus do not cut a peepal, and they circle it. Women walk around it on Saturdays, Shani's day, and during the month of Shravan, tying thread and offering water at its base for the welfare of their families. Its leaves tremble in the stillest air, and people say the tree is never quite asleep.
Banyan and bilva
The banyan (vata), whose aerial roots drop from the branches to become new trunks, is a living image of continuity. On Vat Savitri, married women in North and West India fast and wind thread around a banyan in memory of Savitri, who followed Yama, the god of death, and by her wit and persistence won back the life of her husband Satyavan. The thread is a prayer for the same long life together.
The bilva or bael tree belongs to Shiva. Its leaves grow in threes, read as his three eyes, his trident, or the three gunas offered up to him; on Mahashivaratri and throughout Shravan they are the one offering a Shiva devotee cannot be without. A well-loved story tells of a hunter who spent Shivaratri night in a bilva tree and, to stay awake, plucked leaves that fell unknowingly on a lingam below; by morning he had earned Shiva's grace. The Sri Sukta names the bilva as Lakshmi's tree, so it belongs to prosperity as well.
Banana, neem, durva and mango
The banana plant is tied whole at the entrance of a wedding or temple festival, especially in the South, because it fruits once and gives everything it has. Its leaf is the plate for prasad and feasts. It belongs to Vishnu and Lakshmi and is worshipped on Thursdays. In Bengal, at Durga Puja, a banana plant is bathed, draped in a sari and installed as the Kola Bou beside Ganesha, a reminder that the Goddess is also the harvest.
Neem, bitter and antiseptic, is the tree of Shitala Mata in the North and Mariamman in the South, goddesses who govern fevers and pox. Neem leaves are hung on the door in times of sickness, and the New Year of Ugadi and Gudi Padwa is tasted with neem and jaggery together, bitter and sweet, because that is what a year holds.
Durva, the common lawn grass, is Ganesha's favourite. Twenty-one blades are laid at his feet. The Puranas tell of the demon Analasura, whose fire Ganesha swallowed and which burned him from within until the sages cooled him with durva. The grass grows back however often it is cut, and that resilience is its blessing.
Mango leaves, strung on a thread as a toran over the doorway, mark a festival, a wedding or a new home, and five of them ring the mouth of the kalash. They are replaced when they dry, so that the house is always freshly green at its threshold.
The ecology behind the reverence
It would be a mistake to read all this as superstition dressed as faith. Tulsi and neem are medicinal; peepal and banyan are among the longest-lived and widest-canopied trees of the subcontinent, shading villages and sheltering birds; bilva fruit is a digestive remedy; durva binds soil; banana feeds. The rule against cutting a peepal, the thread wound around a banyan, the lamp lit by the tulsi, are all ways of saying "this is not yours to destroy" in a language that survives across generations.
India's sacred groves, devrai in Maharashtra, kavu in Kerala, sarna among the Adivasi communities of central India, are patches of old forest protected by the belief that a deity lives there, and many hold species that have vanished from the surrounding land. The Bishnoi of Rajasthan have for centuries refused to cut green trees or harm wild animals, and once gave their lives to protect a grove. Reverence, it turns out, is a very good conservation policy.
Bringing it home
A few ways to let this live in your own house:
- Grow a tulsi, even on a windowsill. Water it in the morning. If it dies in a cold winter, plant another; the practice matters more than the plant.
- When you visit a temple that has an old peepal or banyan, walk around it once, slowly.
- Serve a festival meal on banana leaves if you can get them.
- Before you cut a tree in your garden, ask whether it can be pruned instead.
To tend a plant with a lamp and a prayer is to admit that you are not the owner of the earth but one of its guests. That admission is where the sacred begins.