"The balete tree is the home of bad spirits."

"The balete tree (Ficus benjamina) is the home of bad spirits. Those who go near the tree become sick."

Dr Abe V Rotor

Balete has indeed a bad reputation. In fact its real name is strangler’s fig because it slowly strangles its host tree to death, using its trunk as if it were its own until it decomposes underneath its interlacing roots and branches. Years after nothing can be traced of its once benevolent host.

Brace roots of balete wrap around an acacia tree, UST Manila.  Photo by the author.

The juvenile balete is popularly made into bonsai, and the young tree is domesticated into shrub and graces our homes, roadside and parks. But in the forest, it is a monster, taking over towering trees. Some wrest with the emergents, trees that rise above the canopy layer of the forest, virtually piercing through the cloud. 

The tree house in the novel, Swiss Family Robinson, written by Johan Wyss in the 17th century, was built atop a huge balete. A proof of this contention is that the core of the trunk is hollow, which could only mean, the tree strangled its host tree to death. I had the chance to climb the Swiss Family Robinson tree at the Disneyland in Los Angeles, USA, through the tree’s interior spiraling stairs. From the tree house everything below is Lilliputian. Here the Robinsons were safe from the beasts of the forest; it served as their watchtower, too. Of course the tree in Disneyland is made of steel and concrete, but it appeared real the way it is described in the novel.

Anyone who gets near an old balete will develop goose bumps. Imagine walking along Balete Drive (Quezon City) at night and meet a white lady (PHOTO Internet). Old folk will tell you it was a balete Judas Escariot hanged himself. Others will relate how a kapre (black hairy monster) sits high up in the tree, his long thin legs dangling with its cavernous prop roots. 

But in India and other parts of Asia, the banyan tree, a relative of the balete (Family Moraceae) is the home of kind spirits. Banyan is among the longest living tree species after the Redwood and the Bristle Pine. 

Largest banyan tree in Japan (Internet)

Unlike the latter, the banyan actually “walks around,” its prop roots colonizing the immediate surroundings so that a centuries-old tree may reach a diameter of twenty meters or more.  

 Imagine how massive and extensive the banyan is – it can house a temple under its prop roots, making it Ripley’s living house of worship. ~

 

A huge banyan tree sits on an ancient temple in Cambodia.  Head of 

a stone Buddha emerges from a maze of brace roots of banyan in 

Thailand.  (Internet) ~