Saalumarada Thimmakka whose birth date was inscribed as January 1, 1912, died on November 14, 2025 in Bengaluru, (Bangalore), the capital of the state of Karnataka.

This is from her obituary in the NY Times, February 6, 2026.

 

 

Saalumarada Thimmakka in 2018

 

Thimmakka was born in an impoverished family in a village in Karnataka.  Her birthdate was not recorded and so she was assigned a birth date of January 1, 1912 by the Indian Government.  

 

Her parents worked in the fields. She and her siblings supplemented the family’s income by collecting leaves used to make disposable plates and bowls which they sold in neighboring villages.  Older, she found work in a quarry where an accident blinded her right eye. 

 

 

Ms. Thimmakka in 2018 with a group of young people

 

 

In the late 1920s, she married an agricultural worker, Bikkalu Chikkaiah.  Years of infertility left them in despair. She was socially ostracized and attempted suicide.

 

In the late 1940s, when she was about 36, they began planting trees ‘as an act of solace in the face of extreme sorrow’. Starting with 10 saplings, he dug and planted and she fed them with water which she carried.  He encircled the trees with thorny bushes.

 

They planted banyan saplings between her husband’s village and another village two and a half miles away. Every morning they watered the trees with water they carried.

Now, hundreds of banyan trees give shelter in an otherwise parched landscape.

They continued to plant trees.

 

Her husband died in 1991.  Well before this date, people had begun to notice but she was well into her 80s before honours began to accrue.

She was given the name,  ‘Saalumarada’ (a row of trees).  She continued to plant many kinds of trees in open communal spaces and around schools, hospital and residential complexes.  Thousands of trees.

 

Ms. Thimmakka at 108 next to one of the hundreds of banyan trees she planted

 

In 2019, she received the Padma Shri, one of the highest of India’s civilian honours. 

 

Illiterate all her life, poor all her life, a woman of few words, she said that her goal was to inspire people to plant and nurture to maturity at least 12 trees in their lifetimes.

 

Plant and nurture to maturity. Her work now is being carried on by  a young man of 27, Umesh B.N.,  whom she legally adopted when she was 100.

 

She said: “It was my fate to not have any children. Because of that, we planned to plant trees and raise them and get blessings. We have treated the trees as our children.”

 

She said: “Every tree I plant are my children. I am alive in each of them.”

 

She said:  “May there be rain, may there be a good harvest, may you never be a burden on this land. The country will then thrive. That’s all.”

 

 

Ms. Thimmakka in June 2025