The Better India · 9 hours ago

Plants That Attract Butterflies, Bees & Birds: an Ecologist's Guide

Ecologist Sohail Madan remembers childhood highway trips interrupted by a routine chore that no longer exists: stopping at petrol stations to scrape insects from the windscreen. "Children today will probably never know what that looked like," he says - and that quiet erasure is what drives his life's work. After leaving a Silicon Valley engineering career to restore damaged ecosystems across India's Aravalli landscape, Madan now argues that conservation doesn't begin in forests or sanctuaries but on the balconies and terraces of ordinary homes. His Delhi Butterfly Corridor Project stitches together schools, hospitals, and apartment gardens into a living network - proof that fragmented, small acts of attention can rebuild what sprawling indifference dismantled. His deepest counsel, though, has less to do with plants than with presence: put a chair in your garden, have your morning tea there, and let noticing be the first act of repair.