The Quarry Years
Thimmakka was born around 1910 in Gubbi taluk, Karnataka. She never learned to read. As a girl she broke stones at a nearby quarry and married Bikkala Chikkayya, a cattle herder from the village of Hulikal.
The couple had no children. In rural Karnataka of the 1940s, that absence carried a daily weight. Neighbors talked. Thimmakka considered suicide.
Instead, the two of them decided to raise trees.
The Road Between Hulikal and Kudur
They chose the 4 kilometer stretch of highway running from Hulikal to the next village, Kudur. The land was dry and rocky. Banyans grew well there if you could keep them alive through the first summers.
The first year they planted ten saplings. The next year, fifteen. Then twenty. They walked four kilometers each way carrying water in pots on their heads, sometimes four times a day during the dry months. They wrapped thorny branches around each young trunk to keep grazing cattle off.
Over decades the count along that road reached 384 banyans. Every tree was planted by the two of them, by hand, without funding, payment, or instruction from anyone. Beyond the Hulikal-Kudur road she went on to plant an estimated 8,000 trees in her lifetime, scattered across nurseries, school grounds, and village tanks.
After Chikkayya
Bikkala Chikkayya died in 1991. Thimmakka kept walking the road alone. She was over eighty by then and still hauling water to her trees.
The villagers began calling her Saalumarada, Kannada for "row of banyans." The name stuck and replaced her own. Today most people who know of her cannot tell you her birth name.
The trees grew into a green tunnel over the highway. Drivers slowed under the canopy. Birds nested in the aerial roots. The road became one of the most photographed stretches in Karnataka.
Late Recognition
For sixty years she worked unnoticed. In the 1990s journalists found the road and then found her. The awards arrived in a rush.
She received the National Citizen's Award of India in 1995, the Indira Priyadarshini Vrikshamitra Award in 1997, and dozens of state honors. In 2019, at an estimated age of 108, she was given the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honors. At the ceremony she blessed the President of India by placing her palm on his head.
The Karnataka government named a tree-planting scheme after her. A US environmental organization based in Los Angeles took her name as well.
What She Built
Thimmakka founded a nursery for native trees in her later years and began planting again, this time around schools and tanks. She lobbied for a hospital in Hulikal so women would not have to travel for childbirth.
Her 384 banyans are still standing. They are valued in the millions of rupees as timber, though no one will cut them. She told a reporter once that she had no children of her own, so the trees were her children, and she expected them to outlive her by centuries.