The Great Banyan in Howrah, across the Hooghly River from Kolkata, looks like a small forest of grey trunks under one green roof. It is in fact a single tree, a Ficus benghalensis whose canopy now covers about 18,918 square metres, or roughly 4.7 acres, inside the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden.

The Great Banyan’s spreading canopy and aerial-root columns at Howrah, near Kolkata

The Great Banyan in numbers

The Botanical Survey of India, which runs the garden, gives the tree’s crown a circumference of about 486 metres, and its highest branch reaches around 24.5 metres. A road of about 330 metres loops around the edge of the canopy, and most visitors walk that perimeter while looking into the shaded interior.

What makes the tree look like a grove is its root system. Banyans drop aerial roots from their branches; once these reach the soil they thicken into prop roots that work like extra trunks, carrying the weight of the spreading limbs and feeding the tree. The BSI counts more than 4,000 of these prop roots reaching the ground. In 1989 the Guinness Book of World Records listed the Great Banyan as the largest tree specimen in the world by area of spread.

Illustration comparing the size of the Great Banyan’s canopy with a Walmart store

When this post first went viral in 2014, the popular comparison was with a Walmart store: an average American Walmart covers around 105,000 square feet, while the tree was then quoted at about 156,000 square feet. Today’s official figure of 18,918 square metres works out to more than 200,000 square feet, so the canopy has kept growing.

Graphic comparing the Great Banyan’s canopy area with the floor area of a Walmart store

A tree that lost its trunk and kept growing

Nobody knows exactly when the banyan sprouted. The BSI puts its age at over 270 years, and nineteenth-century travel writers already described it, growing out of a date palm, around the time Colonel Robert Kyd founded the garden in 1787.

Two great cyclones, in 1864 and 1867, broke some of its main branches and let a wood-rotting fungus in. The infection spread to the central trunk, which had a girth of about 16 metres, and in 1925 the gardeners removed it to save the rest of the tree. The banyan carried on regardless, supported entirely by its prop roots, which is why locals sometimes call it the “walking tree” or the “immortal tree”. Cyclone Amphan in 2020 cost it more branches and several prop roots, and it still stands.

Visitors walking beneath the Great Banyan’s spreading branches and aerial roots

How gardeners guide the roots

The forest-like shape is partly the work of people. Garden staff feed young aerial roots through bamboo channels and train them to settle in the soil exactly where a heavy horizontal branch needs support. Over years, each of these thin hanging strands becomes a woody column.

Walk the perimeter slowly and you can see every stage: fine roots dangling in the air, roots just touching the ground inside their bamboo guides, and mature pillars thick enough to pass for separate trees. When ripe, its small figs turn red; they are not edible for people.

Dense network of branches supported by aerial-root columns beneath the Great Banyan
Banyan prop roots spreading into leaf-covered ground

Visiting the Indian Botanic Garden in Howrah

The garden lies at Shibpur in Howrah, on the west bank of the Hooghly, opposite central Kolkata. It is easy to reach by taxi or app cab from the city,. The garden is large, so wear comfortable shoes, bring water and plan for a few hours.

  • Best season: November to February, when Kolkata is dry and mild; the monsoon months from June to September are hot, humid and wet.
  • Timing: go in the morning for softer light under the canopy and cooler walking.
  • Respect the roots: stay on the paths and do not climb or swing on the aerial roots, which are living, load-bearing parts of the tree.

The banyan is the star, but the garden also holds exotic plants gathered from five continents, so it is worth exploring beyond the one famous tree.

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