The Man Who Taught a Forest’s Curse to Become Beautiful

How an Engineer turned the Western Ghats’ most hated weed into sculpture, scent, and the furniture of luxury hotels- one cut stem at a time

Walk into the forests of Coorg today and you will meet it before you meet anything else: a low, endless, thorny sea of green, knotted so tight a deer cannot pass through it. It flowers prettily — tiny clusters that blush from pink to orange to gold on the same stem — and that prettiness is exactly how it fooled everyone. Lantana camara arrived in India as a garden ornament. It stayed as an occupation.

Sreekesh Pathal has spent twenty years watching it advance. And then, somewhere along the way, he did something almost nobody else thought to do. He stopped asking how to kill it. He started asking what it could become.

A weed that swallowed a paradise

To understand the man, you have to understand the enemy.

Lantana is not a nuisance. It is one of the most successful botanical invaders on Earth, and India has become one of its great conquests. Researchers estimate it has already taken over more than 150,000 square kilometres of Indian forest, with nearly half the country’s remaining forest area sitting in its path. In the tiger landscapes of the south, it has colonised more than 40 per cent of the range. In parts of the Western Ghats, the thickets are so dense they make up three-quarters of everything growing beneath the canopy.

The plant does not simply spread — it sterilises. It poisons the soil against its neighbours, shades out seedlings, and grows back faster from a cut stump than almost anything you can plant in its place. And the damage does not stop at the plants.

When Lantana replaces the grasses and shrubs that elephants, gaur and deer once ate, the animals do the only logical thing: they leave the forest and walk into the village. They raid crops. They trample fields. Frightened farmers retaliate. The quiet arithmetic of a weed becomes the loud tragedy of human-wildlife conflict — elephants shot, families ruined, a hillside that used to feed both worlds now feeding neither. Add the fires that race through dried Lantana every summer, and you have a forest steadily being rewritten into a single, useless species.

This is the curse Sreekesh Pathal looked at. Most people saw a wall. He saw raw material.

The engineer who planted a rainforest

Pathal’s life has always run on a beautiful contradiction. Born in Kannur, Kerala, he trained as an industrial engineer and built a career in safety and environmental management inside the oil and gas industry — the very business he blamed for so much harm. His reasoning was disarmingly simple: learn the machine from the inside, and earn the money to undo a little of the damage.

So he did. And twenty years ago he spent that money on ten acres of coffee and cardamom plantation in Coorg — then tore the cash crops out by the roots and let the rainforest come home. Today the Shambhala Coorg Private Reserve is an island of what the region used to be, surrounded by an ocean of monoculture. Birdwatchers travel for hours to stand inside it, because the species that vanished from the neighbouring estates still sing here.

The reserve became his laboratory, his pulpit, and eventually the seed of something larger: the Shambhala Foundation, his platform for turning conservation into livelihood.

From poison to poetry

The art came first, almost by accident.

A perfumer by training, Sreekesh Pathal began distilling the wild plants of the Ghats into natural fragrances and then refused to let the scent stay in the bottle. He started painting canvases infused with those perfumes, so a viewer is met by the smell of wet forest before the eye even settles. “You can show a person a graph of extinction and they will nod politely,” he says. “Let them breathe a forest that is dying, and they never forget it.” From those scented paintings grew a quiet luxury business bespoke, ultra-niche custom perfumes, each composed like a portrait of a place.

But his boldest move was to pick up the enemy itself. Working with tribal artisans — the Soliga, the Kuruba, communities whose forests Lantana has stolen — Pathal began turning the weed into objects of desire. The thorny stems that strangled the understorey are now sculpture. And not only sculpture.

The weed that furnishes a five-star lobby

Here is where Sreekesh Pathal’s vision turns genuinely radical. He does not want Lantana sold as a pity-craft on a roadside. He wants it to become aspirational a material people pay a premium to own.

Under the Shambhala banner, harvested and treated Lantana is being shaped into a full design language: hand-built furniture and statement sculptures; sturdy, weatherable bus shelters for towns across the Ghats; the warm, organic interiors of coffee shops that want a story to sit inside; and the woven screens, lighting, and lobby pieces of luxury hotel interiors, where a single Lantana installation can carry an entire sense of place. Every chair, every screen, every shelter is a small extraction — biomass pulled out of the forest, transformed, and sold, with the income flowing back to the artisans who cut it.

It is, in the truest sense, a circular economy: the forest’s problem becomes the village’s wage becomes the city’s beautiful object.

The honest ending

Sreekesh Pathal is the rare visionary who refuses to lie to you about his own miracle. Ask him whether furniture can save the Western Ghats and he laughs. “A chair does not defeat an invasion that covers a country,” he says. “What it does is buy time, and dignity, and a reason for people to keep cutting. The forest still has to be replanted, tree by tree, for years.” Harvesting helps. So does the income. But the real cure is slow, unglamorous, and endless — and he has the rewilded acres to prove he understands that better than anyone.

That honesty is what makes the story land. This is not a fairytale about a weed turned to gold. It is the harder, better tale of a man who looked at the worst thing in his forest and decided that even a curse could be put to work in a sculpture, in a perfume, in the lobby of a hotel a thousand miles away while the patient business of healing went on quietly in the soil.

A plant the forest cannot forgive. And, in Sreekesh Pathal’s hands, the same plant carrying a strange kind of medicine — for the wildlife driven out, for the tribes left behind, and for anyone willing to believe that the way out of a crisis might begin by making it beautiful.