Jambula Tree Festival

7. May 2025

A ceremony for the old หว้า trees — Syzygium cumini, the jambul or Java plum. They grow slowly, stand for well over a hundred years, and several of ours are older than anyone can remember.

After the ceremony the villagers offered food to the monks. Then monks and villagers walked together to the waterfall and wrapped monk’s robes around the trunks of the old trees.

A tree in a robe is not felled. Wrapping robes around trees — บวชต้นไม้, to ordain a tree — was thought up by monks in the north of Thailand in the 1980s to protect forests from the saw. It is young as traditions go, and it works.