My memory of an unnamed junction just outside Chappal Karkhana is inseparable from a single presence: a towering pipal tree, green and gnarled, standing at the heart of the intersection. On summer evenings, its thousands of leaves trembled in the breeze, and the shadow it cast softened the hard asphalt below, briefly bringing the street to life. A chautari circled its base. The junction was always busy- with people, cars, and cattle. Life lingered around the tree.
Years later, I returned to the same spot but could not find the junction. The narrow city street had been widened to accommodate larger vehicles. The tree was gone, and with it, the small world that once gathered underneath its shade. This, however, is not an isolated loss. In a short span of two decades, we have traded our ability to breathe, quite literally, for the promise of ‘development’. When wider asphalt roads, traffic flows, and the rhetoric of modernisation define urban improvement, the removal of roadside trees becomes a minor and necessary sacrifice. ‘What are a few trees on the road to development?’, the argument goes. But can this argument ever be fair if it does not account for the beauty, shade, and the life that once gathered beneath a tree? It is also a question of time. A mature bar (banyan) or pipal cannot be replenished overnight; it takes a generation or more for a sapling to grow into the kind of canopy that once shaped our intersections. What we lose in a single afternoon of felling cannot be replaced within the planning horizon of any road project.
Heritage and production of memory
In the life of a city, what we collectively choose to remember becomes heritage. In Kathmandu, lately, that heritage seems to be measured predominantly in stones and bricks. Since the reinstatement of local government offices in the three main cities of the valley, one of the primary focuses has been the facelift of the city through heritage restoration. The municipal governments in Kathmandu valley have prioritised restoring temples and monuments, polished old squares and waterspouts, and changing the facades of buildings in historical sites to revive the ‘ancient city feel’ of the valley. This follows the mandate of Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA), which identified ‘heritage’ restoration as a major indicator of recovery and resilience following the earthquakes of 2015. The PDNA itself references UNESCO's Operational Guidelines for the World Heritage Convention and the Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site: Integrated Management Framework, both of which emphasise the protection of tangible and intangible heritage, including historic landscapes.
The choices made by local governments around restoration show that heritage is not a passive inheritance from the past—it is actively produced. Decisions about which temples and monuments are restored and to which historical period are part of what scholars describe as an active process of selection and preservation. The word ‘active’ carries yet another meaning here: international guidance, including the PDNA and UNESCO frameworks, that calls for the active participation of local communities in defining what counts as heritage, recognising that beyond institutional curation, heritage is also sustained by everyday practice. In the Kathmandu Valley, however, the active process has so far been largely institutional rather than participatory—restoration agendas are set by municipal offices and federal agencies rather than shaped through community deliberation. Decisions on what counts as heritage, therefore, reveal the present values and priorities of those in power.
So, as we celebrate the revival of built heritage, a living heritage is quietly disappearing from the valley—a heritage that has not made it into the restoration plans. Across the valley, generations-old trees have been felled in the name of development. Over the past two decades, the roads of the valley have been widened repeatedly, only to shrink again under the pressure of ever-increasing traffic. The pattern echoes what the political economist Anthony Downs described in his 2004 book, Still Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak Hour Traffic Congestion—new road capacity attracts new drivers, encourages more dispersed development, and shifts travel away from public transit onto widened roads. The result, Downs argued, is that exaggerated congestion returns to its original level. Each cycle of road expansion in the valley replicates this dynamic, and each time, roadside trees bear the cost. The loss of our old trees is also a question of legislation: whether we have the political will to protect trees of a certain age before they are cut. Different countries have built such protection mechanisms over time. In the United Kingdom, Tree Preservation Orders make it an offence to cut down or uproot a protected tree without written consent from the local planning authority. In Germany, many states protect trees by trunk diameter: any tree above a defined circumference cannot be felled without a permit. South Asia, by contrast, has few equivalents, and Nepal, despite strong constitutional commitments to environmental protection, does not yet have a comparable framework. We are yet to recognise that the loss of the old trees in the Kathmandu Valley is not merely an environmental concern. It is equally a question of heritage—of what we choose to value, preserve, and pass on.
UNESCO defines heritage as ‘our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations’. By this definition, trees, especially those that have stood for decades or centuries, should qualify as heritage. Yet it is worth noting that heritage and protection are two different domains. To call a tree heritage is to acknowledge its cultural and ecological significance; to protect it is a legal and administrative act that requires institutions, enforcement, and political will. In the language of conversation, old trees are sometimes called ‘heritage trees’, or, in the terminology of conservation biologists like Budau and colleagues, ‘monumental trees’, referring to exceptionally large, old, or culturally significant specimens. The loss is mourned as the loss of a living landmark. The 2023 felling of the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian's Wall in northern England, a tree that had stood for nearly two centuries and was a beloved icon of the British landscape, was treated as an attack on national heritage. The perpetrators were prosecuted. In Kathmandu, similar trees are removed without ceremony and replaced, within weeks, by ornamental saplings.
Across South Asia, our relationship with trees is articulated in religious and philosophical traditions long before any urban-planning framework thought to name it. In Sanskrit, the saying vruksho rakshati rakshita (a tree protects those who protect it) captures a worldview in which care for trees is reciprocal. In India, certain temple trees, such as the sacred Madhuka tree at Srimukhalingam or the centuries-old banyans of pilgrimage sites, are protected by religious injunctions that have held for generations. In Nepal, the bar and pipal are similarly revered, with rituals of tying sacred threads, circumambulation, and offerings at their base. The relationship between heritage, ritual, and tree protection, in other words, is older than any policy.
Heritage is not simply inherited from the past. Each generation transforms and reconstructs the heritage it receives. For the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, heritage is a cultural construct, produced through discursive practices that link what is remembered to question of identity and power. The decisions about which stones are restored and which trees are cut down are therefore not neutral. They participate in a wider politics of belonging. In Kathmandu, this framing helps us see the choice to prioritise built heritage while allowing living heritage to disappear for what it is—an exercise of cultural authority, one that quietly shapes the city's memory of itself.
Our failure to reckon with this gradually dissipating urban heritage is also partly linguistic. We rely on arbitrary dichotomies such as ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, as if heritage could exist in two separate worlds. Such false duality collapses in the Kathmandu Valley, where nature and culture have always been entangled and inseparable. Temples are not outside nature, nor are trees outside culture. Bar-pipal trees, for instance, are ecological beings and sacred presences all at once, sites of rest and worship, nodes of social and economic life, and anchors of spiritual practice. These trees have witnessed generations, structured daily movements, sustained communal life, and anchored rituals. When we erase them, we erase part of the city's living archive.
Trees of the valley: then and now
The history of roadside trees in the valley reveals that the disregard for this living heritage is recent. Beyond scattered references, little has been recorded of how trees have historically shaped the city. One article from the mid-2010s, drawing on interviews with city planners, provides a rare glimpse into a time when tree planting was considered an essential part of urban development in Nepal. The article claims that as early as the late 14th century, during the reign of Jayasthiti Malla (1380–1395), cutting roadside trees was a punishable offence, carrying both fines and prison sentences. Trees were understood as public assets, essential to travel, rest, and civic life. The tradition of planting pipal trees at intersections created chautaris, where pedestrians could pause, converse, and seek shelter. These were not incidental but part of the valley's social infrastructure.
During the early 20th century, when Chandra Shamsher expanded roads and pathways, trees were planted along both sides of the streets. He also introduced new species from abroad, such as the monkey puzzle tree, which became part of the valley's botanical and cultural landscape. Similarly, the tree at the Tundikhel Khariko Bot, under which official proclamations and political announcements were made from the Rana period through the 1960s, marked the importance of trees as public infrastructure in the everyday civic life of the valley. Many of the large trees felled in recent years trace their origins to this period. They were not random growths; they were part of a deliberate programme of plantation, even if the Kathmandu of the 1970s was a smaller city and the land around the then-new Ring Road was not yet the densely built-up urban core we now know. Even after the construction of the Ring Road in the 1970s, more than a hundred thousand fast-growing trees were planted to beautify the valley. Yet these same trees have been among the first casualties of subsequent expansion. In 2013, the Departments of Forest in Lalitpur and Kathmandu permitted the Department of Roads to cut down over a thousand trees between Kalanki and Koteshwor. In 2019, more than 2,000 trees were axed along an 8.2-kilometre stretch of the Ring Road as part of an improvement project. Hundreds of mimosa trees, half a century old, were removed from the roadside to pave the way for development.
In the place of old and mature trees, now we are offered a different kind of green—ornamental, decorative, and often poorly planned. A walk from Maitighar to Babarmahal appears greener today than it once did, but the trees lining the road are not the sturdy bar and pipal trees around which life once circulated. Scientific studies have noted that roadside plantation in these areas shows haphazard species selection, prioritising appearance over longevity, shade, or ecological resilience. These trees may photograph well, but they do not survive generations, nor do they host birds. In a similar effort, local governments and federal agencies such as the High-Level Committee for Integrated Development of Bagmati Civilisation have spent millions constructing riverside parks to beautify the city and make the riverbanks green, yet the trees that once stood along these rivers for generations are gone. What is preferred and preserved is a curated landscape, but not a lived one. This shift reflects a deeper transformation in how we imagine nature in the city—not as a part of everyday life, but as a managed backdrop.
Reimagining heritage
This conversation inevitably touches deeper cultural and religious traditions in Nepal, where nature is intertwined with belief systems. Hindu and indigenous practices alike regard trees as sentient, sacred, and deserving of protection. Rituals performed at bar and pipal trees are not symbolic gestures toward nature; they are expressions of a worldview in which humans and non-humans coexist within shared moral landscapes. When such trees are felled, it is not only an environmental loss but a cultural rupture.
Our belief systems also recognise trees as repositories of time. Through processes such as epigenetic change, trees carry the imprint of environmental stresses across generations. They ‘remember’ droughts, floods, and human intervention in ways science is only beginning to understand. While dendrochronology may feel distant from everyday discourse, the idea that trees hold memory is deeply intuitive in a city where people still speak of certain trees as witnesses to history. To cut them down is to erase a form of memory that cannot be archived elsewhere.
However, the contradiction at the heart of Kathmandu's heritage politics is stark. On one hand, there is an intense scramble to enlist sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List, to restore monuments, and to present the valley as a custodian of ancient civilisation. On the other hand, living witnesses to that same civilisation are felled with remarkable ease, often in defiance of public outcry. Our national heritage conservation story is therefore inconsistent and confusing: we seek recognition and even financial incentives through carbon trading and global heritage conservation regimes, while allowing urban trees, critical to both ecology and culture, to disappear.
At the heart of such tensions is a fundamental question: what can be constituted as heritage in the Kathmandu Valley? Is it only the temples we restore and the squares we sanitise, or does it also include bar-pipal ko rukh, chautaris, and the ways of life that unfolded around them? Can heritage be reduced to objects? Or is it more about our practices, relationships, and responsibilities? If it is the latter, the most meaningful inheritance we can offer future generations is not just monuments to admire but cultural repertoires that teach them not only to pray before trees but to protect them.
Heritage, as we understand it in this valley and within conservation programmes, hence needs to be reimagined. It should be more than a static catalogue of buildings; it should be a living system that includes trees as integral actors. The alienation between people and nature is a feature of many modern cities, but it is not unavoidable. It is produced through choices about what we classify as heritage, what we protect, and what we allow to be erased. The grand trees that once lined our streets and centred our chowks offered more than shade; they offered continuity, beauty, and a sense of belonging. By removing them, we are depriving coming generations of both ecological stability and cultural depth. If Kathmandu is to preserve its memory in any meaningful sense, it must learn to recognise its trees not as obstacles to development, but as heritage itself: living, breathing, and irreplaceable.
