The bohar, the banyan, is the village's public room. It shades the platform where men sit, and the phrase pind da bohar means the place where things are decided.
The pipal is planted at temples and near wells and is not cut. The jand, Prosopis cineraria, is the tree of the dry Malwa, the one that survives where nothing else does, and it appears in the Mirza Sahiban story as the tree the arrows were hung in.
The tahli, sheesham, is the furniture timber and was planted along every canal and road by the irrigation and forest departments. It has been dying across Punjab since the 1990s from a decline whose cause is still argued.
The kikar, the neem, the toot, mulberry, for silkworms and for cricket bats and for its fruit, the ber, the amaltas.
The eucalyptus and the poplar came in with agro-forestry from the 1970s and now line the fields. They grow fast, are sold to plywood and paper mills, and use a great deal of water.
A Punjabi village's tree cover is mostly on field bunds and roadsides, not in forest. The state has under four per cent forest and most of the trees people actually live among are not counted in that figure.
The village trees were the pipal at the gurdwara or the shrine, the bohar for shade at the satth, the kikar and the jand in the fields, the tahli for timber and the neem at the door.
The jand is the tree of the dry Malwa and it is sacred in several traditions and is protected by that rather than by law. Several of the old ones stand in fields nobody will clear.
What has replaced them is eucalyptus and poplar on field boundaries, planted for timber, which is a plantation rather than a tree cover and supports almost nothing.