Mother’s Garden - April 1, 2012

Spring!

Flowers are the moment’s representation of things that are in themselves eternal.

Sri Aurobindo

Not only beauty but destruction as well this week in Mother’s Garden. A worker failed to watch the fire in the burn pit and a strong wind came up and blew sparks onto the leaves and the woods caught fire. Huge rhododendrons fifteen years old were destroyed at the border of the garden. For the past weeks we have all been praying for the fires at Ol ari Nyiro the 100,000 acre game preserve where the Global Peace Initiative of Women convened in early March. Dozens of letters and hundreds of prayers have been offered and the fires have now been extinguished and the rains have come. They were set intentionally by poachers who were killing elephants for their tusks. More than 60% of the land has burned. Here the sight is heartbreaking as the rhododendrons were in full bud. Mother’s Garden was saved but the rhododendron border between the Garden and the woods is gone. Ultimately, the responsibility for the fire lies with me and I must accept the consequences and move on trusting in Mother and Sri Aurobindo aspiring to act from an ever-growing consciousness.

So now to share the love of Mother’s Garden this week. The heat has brought the dogwoods and azaleas into full bloom and though there is sorrow in my heart for beauty destroyed it is not strong enough to efface the joy that blossoms forth from branch to branch. For weeks now the native columbine and the lilacs have been in bloom and two of the early peonies are already opening.

The clematis have been pushed very fast by the heat and have already begun to flower.

Clematis ‘Nelly Moser’

Bees are busy everywhere and the weeds are spreading abundantly. The red leaf Japanese Maples are breathtaking and the rare cut-leaf variety, Tamukeyama, is as always, the star of the front yard. In the heat of summer with temperatures often in the high 90’s the red leaf Japanese maples turn green, but not Tamukeyama. (See next page)

This striking red maple loses its color in long, hot summers but Tamukeyama below retains it burgundy red throughout the year.

However, the significance given by the Mother for maples does not refer to the above but to those species and varieties that turn to brilliant red and yellow and orange and often combinations of all with the approach of autumn.

Mother has named these maples Flame of Aspiration, and her comment, written in Her own hand and kept carefully by Tara in dozens of notebooks at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi branch is:

A flame that illumines but does not burn.”

Here is one of my favorites among many of the flaming maples of autumn.

And another…

The Virginia bluebells have completed their display and soon (always an amazing phenomena) the plants will disappear completely into the ground after they have thrown seeds everywhere, only to emerge with their blue and pink bells next spring.

In the world of forms a violation of Beauty is as great a fault as a violation of Truth in the world of ideas. For Beauty is the worship that Nature offers to the supreme Master of the universe; Beauty is the divine language in form. And a consciousness of the Divine that is not translated outwardly by an understanding and expression of Beauty would be an incomplete consciousness.

The first iris have already bloomed, one a tall bearded radiant blue

and the other a lovely yellow miniature rising only 3 inches above the ground.

Mother gave us the significance for the iris, Aristocracy of Beauty. In a forthcoming article we study the iris in depth.

The iberis (Equanimity) continue their long season and certainly they tell me that this is a time for equanimity.

The redbud’s have finished and one variety, Oklahoma, has come out with its burgundy leaves. The climate here is too hot in summer for most of the red colored leaves of redbuds as well as the Japanese maples so the leaves begin to turn green with the onset of summer

The Kwanzan Cherry is scattering its petals on the flagstone paths and, as Sri Aurobindo has written in Savitri,

“All Nature was at beauty’s festival.”

To be continued…