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The history of ferns goes back to the mists of antiquity. There was a time when ferns and plants like them filled the earth. It was a wet and dripping time. Flowers would have been of no use at all but spores could carry on their lives in the prevailing dampness. Some ferns grew as large as trees. The falling stems of these mighty tree ferns were floated together by mighty streams, carried away to the sea and buried under sand and mud. The remains of these plants being thus shut off from the air, could not rot but were slowly changed into coal. The impressions of leaves and stems of these
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If there be a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this.’ The words are inscribed on the wall of the Hall of Special Audience, in the royal garden of the Red Fort of Delhi,
that one evening, while he gazed at the river, something happened to make him feel at peace with the world, and he was so moved by the moment and all that was associated with it, that he decided to build his private pavilion at that spot, inscribing on it the line: ‘If there be a heaven on earth, it is this, it is this.’
the song of the whistling-thrush emerging like a sweet secret from a dark forest;
I was alone in a wild wasteland of wind and water.
‘I will be a writer, and no one can stop me!’
but whenever I feel like giving up, I try to recapture that moment when heaven and earth and I were all one; and then the writing begins again.
Deodars have often inspired me to poetry. One day I wrote: Trees of God, we call them. Planted there when the world was young. The first trees Their fingers pointing to the stars,
