Bauhinia in Bloom

India · nature

A bauhinia tree in full flower, photographed against a pale sky so the canopy reads almost as a black-and-white print. The flowers sit at the tips like a series of small ideas.

Bauhinia trees — the family includes a dozen Indian species, from kachnar to mountain-ebony — bloom for a few weeks each year and then settle back into their normal duty of being one more dense canopy along the road. While they are in flower, though, they go a little strange. The flowers cluster at the tips of the branches, not the centre of the canopy, so a flowering bauhinia from a distance looks like a shrub that has been hung with small bouquets.

I shot this one almost against the light, which knocked the colour out of everything and left the silhouette of the tree as the picture's main subject. The flowers became a series of small pale dots at the perimeter, and the leaves and branches became a dense black lattice in the middle. It is technically a colour photograph but it reads as a print. There is a category of trees in India that look better in silhouette than in colour. Bauhinia, when it is flowering, is one of them. It is a tree that has thought about its outline.

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