Be ready at 6.00 am on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, I told Usha.

Are you kid­nap­ping me? asked Usha sportingly.

Actu­ally, Usha is worth kid­nap­ping and the thought has crossed my mind (I’d exchange her for my mom any day. Okay I hope my mom’s not a closet reader of my blog!). But, no, I wasn’t.

I had heard about the Green Her­itage Walk at Lal­bagh from friends a few friends and I thought Usha being a fre­quent vis­i­tor to Lal­bagh would enjoy it.

So, bright and early at 6.15 am on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, we made our way to the base of the rock at the East gate of Lal­bagh, join­ing Vijay Thiru­vady and a group of 4 oth­ers who were already there.

Geetha got there about 10 min­utes later and after a brief his­tory from Vijay about the rock (appar­ently, it’s one of the world’s old­est rock for­ma­tions), we started off on the walk.

I’ve been to Lal­bagh quite a few times and even admired the beau­ti­ful tree cover, but never really knew either the names or the his­tory behind these trees.

As Vijay (lit­er­ally a walk­ing talk­ing ency­clopae­dia of tree related facts) enlight­ened us as we pro­ceeded into the gar­den, there are over a 1000 plant and tree species in Lal­bagh. And trees have been brought from far away and exotic places like Africa, South Amer­ica and Per­sia, years and years ago. Both Hyder Ali and Tipu Sul­tan who are the orig­i­nal founders of the gar­den were pas­sion­ate about build­ing the per­fect gar­den and we have them to be thank­ful for the city’s biggest green stretch of 240 acres.

As we moved from tree to tree, Vijay kept us engrossed with loads of inter­est­ing tid­bits and facts. I don’t think we’ll ever take the trees for granted the next time we walk around Lalbagh!

By the time the walk ended three hours later, we were a informed but very hun­gry bunch as we headed for a huge break­fast of rava idlis, dosas, khara bath, grape juice, almond milk and gulab jamuns.

The Green Her­itage walk is con­ducted by BangaloreWalks.com and hap­pens on weekends.

More Pic­tures from the Green Her­itage Walk