Kolkata's Great Banyan is one tree standing on 2,880 extra trunks
A banyan often starts life high in another tree, dropping roots to the ground that thicken into trunks. Given time it can smother its host and keep spreading sideways indefinitely. The Great Banyan of Kolkata now props itself on 2,880 supplementary trunks, a single organism that looks like a grove.
Birds eat banyan figs and scatter the tiny seeds. On a shaded forest floor a seedling rarely survives, but seeds lodged in the branches of other trees, or in the cracks of buildings, sprout and send roots downward. As those roots reach soil and fatten, their mesh squeezes the host tree and commonly kills it. When the dead host rots away the banyan is left with a hollow core, a prized shelter for forest animals. Figs outside the banyan group share this strangling habit, as do unrelated plants such as Clusia.
The name began with Ficus benghalensis, the Indian banyan and national tree of India. European travellers noticed that Indian traders, the Baniyas, gathered in its shade, and a garbled version of their name stuck to the tree. It was later extended to every strangler fig in the subgenus Urostigma. Like all figs, banyans rely on tiny fig wasps, which shelter and feed inside the fruit, for pollination.
Some individual trees are famous. Thimmamma Marrimanu in Andhra Pradesh, over 550 years old, is recognised as the largest, with a canopy of about 21,000 square metres, while the Great Banyan's canopy covers 4.67 acres. Carbon dating from 2022 to 2025 showed parts of a banyan in Munger, Bihar, to be at least 700 years old. In Lahaina on Maui, a tree planted on 24 April 1873 lost roughly half its canopy in the August 2023 wildfires. Even in miniature they endure: a banyan bonsai in Tainan, 240 years old, is Taiwan's oldest.
The tree runs through belief. Married women in parts of India tie threads around banyans during the festival of Vat Purnima, the Buddhist Pali canon likens its takeover of a host to desire overwhelming a person, and Vietnamese legend reads the Moon's dark patches as a banyan that flew up carrying a man named Cuội. Indonesia's coat of arms uses the banyan to stand for national unity.
Source: Banyan
