The middle chapters of Upavanavinoda turn into a hospital for trees. The same doṣa logic that classifies human disease is applied, without a pause, to plants: trees catch vāta, pitta, and kapha, they get fevers and wounds and parasites, and they are treated with pastes, fumigations, and dressings that would not look out of place in a physician's manual. This is vṛkṣāyurveda, the forgotten half of the tradition.
A tree's three doṣas
The diagnostic frame is explicit. "With bitter, astringent, and pungent tastes, the sixfold wind (vāta) becomes vitiated; with salty, sour, unctuous, sweet, sour, and salty tastes, phlegm (kapha) becomes aggravated." Then the translation to botany: "One should know roughness, nodosity, and crookedness as arising from vāta in a tree; withering of shoots and flowers, and stunted growth with withered appearance in a tree — these become worms (pests)." The remedy follows the diagnosis: "Smearing with cow's urine, ghee, viḍaṅga, and mustard paste; when destroyed, then [the tree] rises again quickly when sprinkled with milk-water and fumigated."
One should know roughness, nodosity, and crookedness as arising from vāta in a tree; withering of shoots and flowers, and stunted growth with withered appearance in a tree — these become worms (pests); one should carefully remove them.
Wounds, burns, and the frog-water cure
The therapeutics are wonderfully concrete. A tree broken by fierce winds is bound with ropes and posts, "filled with smooth clay, sprinkled again with milk," and left to recover. A tree scorched by fire gets a plaster of thick uśīra, licorice, green gram, black gram, barley, and sesame ground with milk and water, sprinkled repeatedly until it "returns to its natural state." Tree wounds are rubbed with ghee and sesame, then sprinkled with cold milk and water. And for a tree gone barren: "Having produced flowers and fruits, this tree becomes barren; sprinkled again with water from a leather bag containing a frog, it bears fruit again."
Hear the medicine for the life of a tree scorched by fire: thick ushira, licorice, green gram, black gram, barley, and sesame. Ground and mixed with milk and water, sprinkle it repeatedly; thus sprinkled, the nourished one will quickly return to its natural state.
Fertilizer as medicine: kunapa-jala
The text even has a compost recipe. Kunapa-jala, 'carcass water,' is brewed by cooking ingredients with water and milk, adding honey, meat, and ghee, and leaving the vessel "for a fortnight in a warm place" until it becomes a nourisher. Sprinkled on roots, it feeds the tree the way a tonic feeds a patient. Other pages read like agronomy experiments: a root smeared with curd and sprinkled with sugarcane juice "bears flowers in four days"; a branch smeared with a paste of honey and milk "quickly bears fruit even when unripe."
Trees as crop forecasters
The last trick of the chapter is prediction. "Observing the growth of fruit, flower, and leaf of forest trees, one should know the easy availability of substances and also the production of crops. By the banyan, barley; by the growth of the tinduka, the ṣaṣṭika rice is produced. By the aśvattha, the production of all crops is to be known." The forest, read correctly, is a weather service: mango means welfare, bhallātaka means fear, arjuna means excellent rain.
Reading the tree-medicine chapters, I kept forgetting this was a manuscript about gardens. The same clinical eye that describes a human fever describes a wilting branch; the same pastes, the same logic, the same hope of recovery.