Every year, in February, the floor of my backyard is carpeted with semal flowers. There are heaps of them everywhere. The boundary wall, the barbed wire on the boundary wall, the iron gate, all are festooned with them. They beautify the bonnets of cars and are wasted in the muddy open drains.

A few years ago, around this time of year, a poet friend, who has moved to a cold country, asked, “Have the semals bloomed yet in Delhi?” She missed the sight of them scattered on the streets, pavements and bylanes of the city. This is the depth of feeling that the semal or the silk cotton tree (Bombax malabaricum/Bombax ceiba) elicits. Its flowers fall to the ground, inviting you to look up and gaze at their brilliant red against the city’s blue spring sky. Yes, you read that right, Delhi has blue skies in the season of basant.

Every year, I wait for the semal tree in the service lane outside my house to bloom. As a nature photographer and bird watcher, it is my favourite tree. The city’s squirrels love the semal too, as do the black drongos, the rufous treepies, the butterflies, wasps and spiders.

Its timing is perfect. The blooms appear just after the end of the harsh Delhi winter. Once the heat begins, these beautiful flowers are replaced by the brown woody fruit that bursts open to present the world with its super soft silk cotton.

With camera in hand, I was searching for the birds, squirrels and insects that hide behind the flowers when the house help complained, “These flowers create such a much mess everyday; it’s so difficult to clean the stains they leave behind.”

“Every single flower goes in the compost bin. Don’t throw them in the garbage; they are good for plants,” I said without moving my eye away from the camera. “Spray a bit of the bio-enzyme we made last year, leave it for a while and it will remove the stains on the floor.”

Even if the bio-enzyme spray were to fail, those stained floors would still be a lovely reminder of the magnificent beauty of the neighbourhood semal trees in Delhi’s fleeting season of spring.

Prerna Jain is an artist and photographer based in New Delhi. An extensive collection of her work can be found at her website www.prernasphotographs.com and at facebook.com/prernasphotographs. She is the author of My Feathered Friends

The views expressed are personal