NAIROBI MAY be East Africa’s largest, busiest and most populous city. But it is more than just an aggregation of buildings and roads.

Along the Kenyan capital’s Limuru Road, there is a 60- hectare island of greenery. It is a wedge-shaped park sandwiched in the fork where Forest and Limuru roads diverge in the northern Nairobi suburb of Parklands.

It is a Friday morning and we have chosen to take a walk in City Park. From Limuru Road off Aga Khan Hospital, there is a gate just before Hawkers’ Market to what the National Museums of Kenya calls the “heart and lungs” of the Kenyan capital.

There is a wide field near the road but deeper in, there are tall trees. A stream carrying the murk of the suburb flows through the southern part of the forest, headed to the east of the city. Birds chirp in unison with the buzzing of bees as dew reflects sunlight, creating a glassy look.

Occasionally, a curious Syke’s monkey jumps from one tree branch to another, low enough to check out our intentions. We have also seen a mother Vervet monkey jump to the ground to pick up a banana peeling before returning to her favourite Jacaranda tree, baby tucked into her belly.

In this home of millions of grasshoppers, a Jackson’s forest lizard emerges from a dead stump, snatches a moth and dashes to the safety of a dark cavity in the dead wood. Nearby, a red dropwing treats itself to nectar from a bush of Bengal flowers and dances to the next.

But the noisemaking hornbill threatens to reveal the hideouts of a skunk warming itself on a rock nearby. As soon as the noisy bird is at it, a mountain wagtail flies away from its perch, probably scared by the noise but also thankful that the hornbill alerted it.

This is Nairobi City Park, which has been around longer than the FIFA men’s World Cup. For more than 80 years, it has served as a place of recreation and a venue for cultural activities as well as a natural repository for Nairobi’s dwindling biodiversity.

Designed during the colonial days by the then Parks Superintendent Peter Greensmith, who was a landscaper and park planner, the park is perhaps the only intact parcel of land within the city limits hosting indigenous trees.

In 1932, when the colonialists were at the height of their power, it had lush gardens, flowers and trimmed lawns side by side with these trees. On Sundays, a brass band used to perform for townspeople who chose to come to the park for picnics or to walk away the week’s pressures. To this day, the bandstand appaers to be waiting for another “Sunday Show.”

Handout photographs from the Friends of City Park show Mr Greensmith receiving Queen Elizabeth at the Park in 1959. Another set shows groups of four or more sitting on the grass in the Central Lawn, enjoying the performance of the City Park Band in 1962.

Botanists and bird watchers found City Park a valuable ecosystem. To the west of the Park lie a war memorial cemetery for British World War I soldiers and the Goan community cemetery.

The Forest stretches from the edge of Limuru Road over the Kibarage stream to the furthest end near the Mathare River to the east.

Here, there are trees such as Muhugu or Mahogany, Giant diospyros and the cape chestnut, African Olive, Bush night fighter, Rat Aloe, white Jacaranda and many more. Further north of the Park, lie the last remains of Kenya’s second Vice President Joseph Murumbi, who died in 1990 and nationalist Pio Gama Pinto, felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1965.

Murumbi’s burial site has since been turned into a memorial garden.

But these days City Park is not the haven on earth it used to be. Only a few people can be seen walking or enjoying the serene environment. The stream which used to carry drinkable water down to the east is turbid. Bushes of devils whip, West Indian lantana, wild tobacco and bug weed compete for space as mosquitoes breed liberally.

The Park is now a dumpsite for residential houses and the market. It has also turned into a hideout for muggers. Initially, film makers and TV crews used the park to shoot scenes.

These days, it can be suicidal to go there. “Things have changed. There is no leisure anymore. You can lose all your recording equipment to robbers,” says veteran TV actor Moses Wekesa, who starred in Tahamaki and Tausi, some of the episodes of which were recorded in this Park.

“The Park was safe only up to late 1990s. These days, muggers have found a place to wait for their targets,” he says.

At the same time, herbalists, loggers and firewood collectors have been harvesting some of the trees. “If you walk around the forest, you can see that some of the trees are stripped of their barks,” says Patrick Githinji, a construction worker who uses the paths in the forest as shortcuts to his workplace.

Yet it has not yet died. Environmentalists think it is miraculous the Park still exists. “Nairobi is fortunate for being able, even in the face of intensifying pressures, to retain at its heart, a small yet important fragment of the area’s original dry upland forest,” says Jyoti Nadkarni, the chair of Friends of City Park.