A Traveller's Tale: The Remarkable Journey of Lantana Camara
It is not widely known that Lantana, with its attractive flowers—familiar to us from gardens and hedges, roadsides and forests—is actually a relative newcomer to our shores. Its travels began in Latin America, when it first caught the eye of a European ‘plant hunter’ several centuries ago. In this lecture, Ankila Hiremath traced the journey of Lantana, how it arrived in India and made its home here, and what this meant for the plants, animals, and people that it encountered in its new home.
About the Scientist
Ankila Hiremath is an ecologist interested in questions that lie at the interface of human and natural systems. A lot of her work over the past two decades has been in forests and woodland savannas of the Biligiri Rangan Hills in Karnataka, in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu, and in the Banni grasslands of Kutch. She has spent a lot of time thinking about plants like Lantana and Prosopis.