Saalumarada Thimmakka, mother of trees, has died, aged 114

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Along a dusty road between Hulikal and Kudur in southern India, banyan trees rise like sentinels. Their thick roots grasp the earth, their canopies stretch wide, casting deep shade over the red soil. Travelers who pass beneath them find little reason to wonder how they came to be, or who first pressed a sapling into the ground more than seventy years ago. Yet that green corridor—nearly four hundred trees strong—was the life’s work of a woman who owned almost nothing and asked for even less. She was born around 1911, in a village so small it barely warranted a name on a map. There was no school; she worked as a laborer in a quarry. She married young, to a man w