We had been working on a tree list for several months now. Most permaculture books are not written for India. So its difficult to find tree names and sources in these manuals. We referred to the book by Pradip Kishen - Trees of Delhi.
This became our handbook for selection of wild & native trees for the forest. For the orchard, almost every nursery owner and horticulturist would be able to give a list of trees.
The second question we had was where to source the trees from. When you are buying over a 1000 trees, you have to be careful about how much you are paying for them as the bill can suddenly run into tens of thousands. We decided to go to Saharanpur and get the trees from there.
In the weeks leading up to the trip to Saharanpur, I had got the name and number of a Nursery chap, called Farman bhai. I had been speaking to him over the phone, and placed the large order of 275 Casurina Trees and 275 Silver Oaks for the peripheral wind break, up ahead. However, the other trees of which we needed only 6 or 10 sapling each, we would have a face to face discussion.
Unfortunately, it was pouring again the day we went to Saharanpur. However, since we were working on a tight deadline, we could not defer our program. We met Farhan bhai and under a leaky tent of sorts, went through our long list of trees. For many he didn't know the English name, and we didn't know the HIndi. For many he knew a distorted version of the scientific name, which we could not match with any tree in our book!
Ultimately, after several hours of discussion, we placed an order for a 1000+ trees which arrived after a day's gap. By which time we were confident of having all the holes ready.