Sacred texts are guides to living while temples and the religious community teach a thing or two about what has been and what will be. But do temple gardens move beyond their aesthetic value and stand for something greater? Yes, their valuable insights into living ecosystems.

Some of these old surviving forest patches are invaluable when it comes to shining a light on what a forest might have been like in the area several thousand years ago, like a relic to an ancient civilisation. Considering the Indian government’s rapid march towards creating new forests to combat deforestation, sacred groves, their histories and regeneration can be a blueprint to such plans. “In short, one could say sacred groves provide a small window into an ecosystem’s past,” said Osuri. “They might even provide a source population and a reference library.”

Scroll brings more information from the village of Sivasailam in Tamil Nadu, India:

From one side, the Kadamba tree veiled the towering Gopuram of the temple. The leaves shifted in the early evening breeze to reveal glimpses of the colourful, ornate sculptural work of the 500-year-old temple. A few metres away, along river Kadana, boisterous groups of women slapped wet clothes against tired stones.

Between the temple and the river is a small patch of an old garden, cool and quiet. Some visitors sat around while a few napped. The garden is as old, if not older, than the temple, says Ganapathy, the 73-year-old gardener of this temple in Sivasailam village, about 40 kilometres from the town of Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. Such traditional temple gardens, called Nandavanam, are strewn along the banks of the river Tamaraparani that originates in the Western Ghats. Each is attached to one of the 150-odd temples in the region, some as old as 1,000 years.

A Saravanan and M Mathivanan, research associates with the Bengaluru-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, a scientific research organisation, have been investigating the history and ecological significance of the Nandavanams in Tirunelveli and Tuticorin districts.

“These are similar to sacred groves in the rest of India,” said Saravanan. “Traditionally such gardens and forests, which surrounded the temple, would hold trees and plants that would be beneficial to the temple. For instance, they would provide oil to the lamps, medicines, fruits and flowers for worship.” While traditionally sacred groves existed before a temple did, Nandavanams were built around a temple. But functionally, they were similar.

Sacred groves form a network of informally protected sites, much like a join-the-dots game. “Even though individually they may be very small to support a lot of biodiversity, collectively they provide a range of different habitats for a range of different species,” said Shonil Bhagwat, lecturer, faculty of science, Open University in the UK. Bhagwat has been studying sacred forests in the Western Ghats for more than 15 years and is particularly interested in people’s interaction with their natural environment in an increasingly human-dominated world.

Owing to their relatively longer history of formal protection of forests, sacred groves host unique assemblages of biodiversity – species and genes – that are not found elsewhere, kind of like a repository.

“It is difficult to imagine being able to conserve all of India’s biodiversity in formal protected areas, which cover less than 5% of our geographic area,” said Anand Osuri, a PhD student at the National Centre for Biological Sciences. “It is important that we understand and utilise the potential of areas outside protected areas to conserve biodiversity. Although small and often fragmented, these networks can provide resources such as fruiting trees or nesting sites, as well as act as stepping stones for wildlife across human-used landscapes.” Osuri works primarily in the moist evergreen forests and forest fragments in Kodagu, Karnataka.

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