Photo of the Week - Awla

Photographs by Kadambini Panse

New leaves and blossoms on the Awla tree (Indian Gooseberry). It is a wonderful, stately tree.  Very useful from the dietary and medicinal point of view too.  Here are some of the things we do with the Awla fruit -

• Make sarbat (juice).
• Make loncha (pickle).
• Make morawla (jam).
• Make chutney.
• Make supari.
• Add to shikakai (for hair shampooing).
• Make triphala churna (ayurvedic medicine).

When the tree was a lot smaller, a chum of mine caught his ear on one of its branches and he bled a lot. I don't know why I'm mentioning it, except I just remembered how fascinated we were with the bright red blood and how hard he tried, fueled by our fascination, to not burst into tears.