Natures Notebook

The Road to Mandalay

The giggling and snickering immediately ceased with a brief, steel-eyed glare toward the rear of Room 619. Miss Pettengill began her recitation with a faux Cockney accent. Of course, it was rather humorous to hear our buttoned-up English teacher, with normally perfect elocution, dropping her leading “H’s” and the trailing “G’s” like a drunken Eliza Doolittle. Undeterred, Miss Pettengill continued the stanza until she got to the first refrain.

I often wondered why Miss Pettengill chose this particular poem from Rudyard Kipling’s body of work. It is a story of a former British soldier who longs for a past, a place, and a Burmese girl a hemisphere away. Upon first reading, Mandalay is merely a cocktail of nostalgia with a twist of melancholy. Yet, between the lines there is an undercurrent of an exotic romanticism. Like me, perhaps our teacher longed to watch the sun set over the Irrawaddy River, smell the sacred incense wafting from golden-spired pagodas, and savor fruits from trees with unpronounceable names. Kipling’s prose and National Geographic would serve as our transport to these forbidden places.

Kipling was born in Bombay during the height of British colonization.

Victoria was his Queen, and the sun never set on Rudyard’s British empire. While Kipling wrote his stories about Southeast Asia, the

English were busy rafting teakwood logs down the Irrawaddy in the inexorable pursuit of commerce. Miss Pettengill continued:

Less than twenty years ago, a new tree was introduced to South Florida that is gaining popularity each season. Relatively small at thirty feet, her branches outstretch upwards, as if longing for embrace. The bright pink blossoms are closely spaced down the full branch length, like the silken, traditional longyi skirt of the Burmese. This shy beauty is known by many names around the world. Some have named her the Pink Shower Tree for the “shower” of blossom that fall from her boughs, but I prefer The Wishing Tree.

Shell Point’s Wishing Tree specimen is young and planted in our Flowering Tree Arboretum, located behind The Arbor building in the Woodlands. We planted it for the Burma girl, the British soldier and, for Miss Pettengill. We planted it for you and planted it for me. We planted the Wishing Tree for all romantics in the world that dream of exotic places to see.

On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’-fishes play, An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me; For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay! ”