Human Flower Project

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Adventskranz

With evergreens and candles, advent wreaths build anticipation of December 25

Lighting the Adventskranz
Photo: Johann Peter Heber School

Thanks to John Stokes, long-distance friend and faithful steward of Mary’s Gardens, for sending this piece from ZENIT: an interview with Father Juan Javier Flores Arcas, rector of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of St. Anselm in Rome, about the meaning of the Advent wreath.

On the Sunday closest to November 30 (the Feast of St. Andrew), these circles of greenery are brought into houses and churches, and the first of four candles is lit. The custom in our Episcopal Church was to light one more candle each Sunday until Christmas. On December 25, all four would shine.

Catholic Community of Pleasanton, CA
Photo: via St. Nicholas Center

According to Father Arcas, purple is “most appropriate” for the candles, this color being both regal and penitential. The wreath itself, he says, “must be placed in a visible place in the presbytery—very near the altar, very near the pulpit—on a small table, or the trunk of a tree or hung from the ceiling.” Interesting, how the tree slips in.

Lighting candles and logs with the approach of Winter solstice is a custom far older than Christianity. A strong fire could lengthen winter days and ward off icicles, much appreciated in the high latitudes of Scandinavia. Lights at four points of the compass and green boughs bent into a circle suggest an ancient pagan custom, but according to a couple of sources, the Advent wreath (known in its native Germany as Adventskranz) is relatively modern. Wikipedia credits Johanes Hinrich Wichern, a Protestant minister, with designing the first one. He was running an orphanage in 19th century Hamburg, Germany, and surely trying to contain the children’s excitement. It’s said that the first wreath held 28 candles, four “Sunday” ones taller than the rest.  With each passing day, another candle would be lit, until the whole wreath shone on Christmas. (The Advent calendar, also of German origin, likewise builds suspense day-by-day.)

Advent wreath
Photo: Odla

While in the U.S., one most often finds Advent wreaths in churches or schools, in Germany it’s also become customary to have such a wreath at home. “We always had an advent wreath when I was growing up,” writes Carol Lehr. “Right before bedtime my brothers and I gathered around the wreath and we each took turns lighting the candle(s) and reading the bible verses. I can’t, in all honesty, say that as a child I appreciated the tradition. But I must have gotten something from the practice because I carried on the same custom with my children.” More evidence that the juice of tradition is in the passing as much or more than in the practice.

Writer Ken Collins takes an especially down-to-earth approach: “Historically, the candles have no more meaning than a countdown. That is, they originally stood for 4, 3, 2, and 1. However, people like for things in the church to have symbolic meanings,” he writes, and goes on to specify for us those associations. As Collins suggests, this is custom in its late mannerist phase, the same kind of symbolic filigree that emerged with “the language of flowers.”

“If someone in your church tells you that the candles have some other meaning than Hope, Love, Joy, or Peace, they aren’t wrong, they are just different,” he advises. “The meanings are so new,”—so superfluous and arbitrary, we might add—“that they aren’t completely standardized.”

St. Anthony High School
Detroit, MI (1961)

Collins alludes to Advent’s older, more solemn mood—before the piping in of “ring-ting-tingling,” etc. In keeping with this penitential spirit, there were to be no flowers on the Advent wreath (December in Germany isn’t known for its blooms anyway). The third Sunday in Advent, however, was known as Gaudette Sunday, a day to lighten up on austerity. According to Collins, priests would change their vestments from dreary purple to rose on this day; and “the pope had the custom of giving someone a rose,” late in the Advent season.  John, do you know any more about this papal custom?

While the Adventskranz does seem to have originated among German Lutherans, it’s now a custom observed by Presbyterians in Alabama, Episcopalians in California, Anglicans in Melbourne. Perhaps because it’s not bound to Christian liturgy, the Adventskranz crops up and lights up in schools, hotels, and even on the German airline Lufthansa.

Adventskranz aboard
Photo: Lufthansa

“There are seven on each jumbo jet,” we learn, “adorned with apples, cinnamon sticks, pyracantha and other greenery, and festive red bows.”

And why not? Father Arcas says, “Advent is a live and actual time. While we hear the still unfulfilled prophecies, we see the world pass before our eyes and long for the world to come...”

...where, along with lights and greenery, there will be flowers.

Monday, November 28, 2005

Colombia: Cutting Corners on Cut Flowers

The California Cut Flower Commission has rounded up its Congressional delegation, and says Colombia has cheated on a flower-trade pact with the U.S..

Image: consensus.net

Except for a few international mega-farmers and some trade negotiators with their careers on the line, nobody seems to like the Andean Free Trade Agreement. The first pact, made in 1991, ostensibly was to wean the Colombian economy from growing coca and trading in narcotics.

This speech from U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick (2002) trumpets Colombia’s cut flowers as the showiest sign of AFTA’s success.

“As many of you know, a free flow of exports - and imports - can help to inject new energy into the Colombian economy. The Colombian flower industry embodies the success of Colombia’s export sector. In 1965, Colombia exported just $20,000 worth of flowers. Ten years later, flower exports were valued at more than $20 million. And today, these exports total nearly $600 million. The flower industry generates 75,000 direct jobs in Colombia - and these are good jobs, offering year-round stability and health and retirement benefits.

“Nearly 85 percent of Colombia’s flower exports go to the United States, and these shipments have contributed to impressive job creation in our home market: 7,000 people work in jobs connected to the imports of Colombia’s flowers; aviation and trucking companies that transport Colombian flowers employ some 3,600 people; U.S. supermarkets employ more than 24,000 people in their flower departments; and U.S. flower shops employ nearly 125,000 people.”

Who’s he kidding? With the influx of cheap flowers, chain groceries have put thousands of independent U.S. florists out of business, and thousands of growers in the U.S. have given up flower farming. Also, just this month Human Rights Watch and the AFL/CIO, among others, have lodged objections to the AFTA over working conditions in Ecuador. Now the California Cut Flower Commission, claiming that Colombia is unfairly subsidizing its flower production, says it may sue the Colombian government.

“It’s unfair, and it’s illegal,” Peggy Dillon of the CCFC told the Santa Cruz paper. AFTA stipulates that “Colombia’s flower growers can only receive $15 million a year in subsidies.... When the Colombian government announced last year that it was going to give hundreds of growers as much as $40 million to help offset the devaluation of the peso against the dollar” California growers began mobilizing themselves and their Congressional delegation.

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, leading the charge, called the increased subsidies, “a slap in the face to our growers, not to mention illegal under WTO trade rules.”

California rose
Photo: California Cut Flower Commission

Santa Cruz County, California, was a center for rose production as recently as 20 years ago. Now “there are fewer than a dozen rose growers left.” U.S. rosarians have tried disparaging the big blooms of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador. “They kind of look like a small piece of cabbage,” said Arne Thirup, a grower in Pajaro. “They don’t open up like our roses do.” But the fact is most U.S. consumers like the big Southern roses just fine—Roses grown in Latin America now make up 80% of the U.S. market.  “What’s mainly left is the wedding industry,” one California grower told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “It’s very high end”—a bastion of conspicuous consumption in an otherwise cut-rate society.

The complexities of trade agreements are, honestly, beyond us, but here are some diverse views of the Andean Free Trade Agreement: a rah-rah report issued via the Japanese Embassy, a more modulated assessment from the Global Policy Forum, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce line, and an up-to-date report from a blogger on Colombian issues.

Of them all, this account from Javier Ponce, a columnist in Quito, Ecuador, rings truest to us. Ponce writes that “the greatest economic potential of the FTA lies in the products controlled by the big agricultural corporations: banana, flowers, broccoli, and palm hearts.” Meanwhile, small farmers who grow rice, meat, and maize—the region’s food supply—will be dispossessed.

For now, Colombia and Ecuador have broken off talks with the U.S. over AFTA. If the California growers and their Congresspeople can ever join forces with U.S. labor-rights activists and environmentalists, there will be just a madrigal group of supporters left.  The Andean Free Trade Agreement may very well be redesignated in 2006: as an international trade “Disagreement.”

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The Mayflower

Thorny hedge or creeping shrub? There’s cross-Atlantic dispute over which plant gave its name to the Pilgrims’ ship.

Pilgrim Overboard—The Rescue of John Howland
Painting: Mike Haywood

At daybreak November 9, 1620, passengers on the Mayflower at last spotted land. They’d been on board for 66 days, having left Southampton, England, on September 16, sailing for the Hudson River. At the urging of the ship’s owner, Christopher Jones, who was ready to get on with business, they gave up on finding the Hudson and settled west of Cape Cod in Plymouth, Massachusetts, instead.

Half of the immigrants died that winter. The rest is historic gravy. Those who survived spent the next soevermany years trundling around in black outfits, shooting turkeys and testing the local Indians’ recipes with corn.

But what about the Mayflower? Jones took the ship back to England the following spring and made “another trading run to France later that year.” (He’d been an importer of cognac before transporting the Pilgrims.) One source says that by 1624, the ship was in such bad shape it was more valuable as scrap lumber and torn apart.

Epigaea repens
Photo: Mike Baker

None of this explains who named the ship and after which flower of May (arguably the most bloom-diverse month in both Englands, old and New).  The State of Massachusetts adopted one mayflower as its floral emblem in 1918, triumphing with a vote of schoolchildren over advocates of the mountain laurel and water lily. But Epigaea repens is a New World flower; only a prescient and botanically exacting shipwright could have given the English boat such a name.

Crataegus monogyna
Photo: Nemorosa

Far more likely is the hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna. This thorny hedge plant, widely known as “mayflower” in England, is “one of the nine sacred trees of the British Isles.” For centuries it’s been used as a heart remedy in herbal medicine. To confuse things further, there’s also wild lily of the valley (Maianthemum canadense) that grows in New England, known as Canada mayflower.

Logic and pilgrim pride, in our view, both favor the hawthorn rather than the lily or epigaea, a.k.a. “Trailing arbutus” and described as “a low creeping” plant. But as they say (or used to say), “it’s a free country.” Take your pick.

The Mayflower II (1957 replica), Plymouth, Mass.
Photo: James C. Ferenzi

The 1957 Mayflower II, a replica anchored in Plymouth Harbor, bears a white flower on its stern, but the painting is generic, and could be the hawthorn or arbutus. (This site suggests that paintings were commonplace on 17th century vessels, the better for non-readers.) Perhaps a stylized painting preceded the christening of the ship itself—with a generic flower-name to match.

Good wishes this Thanksgiving to those on both sides of the Atlantic, and the six other “seas” as well. To all who are about to venture forth with extended family for the weekend, we offer this suggestion from Pastor John Robinson’s farewell letter, read aboard the Mayflower September 1620, as the Pilgrims were leaving England.

“Your intended course of civil community will minister continual occasion of offense, and will be as fuel for that fire, except you diligently quench it with brotherly forbearance.”

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Decisions, Decisions…Poppy Seed

Time has come today, a choice between the garden and the kitchen.

Kolaches
Photo: Kolache Depot

Ave Bonar instructed us soon after we moved to Texas that November is the time to plant poppy seed. Sow in the spring if you live up north, but here, poppies need a cooler send off. Aggie horticulturists recommend: “Scatter the seeds over bare soil in full sun in late fall. Dragging a rake over the seed bed will provide adequate preparation for the seed. When seeding a large area, mix the tiny seeds with sand to facilitate even sowing. Keep the seed bed moist. Germination occurs in about a week.”

In years past, we’ve skipped the sand and ended up with a mat of seedlings (and, come spring, a crop of puny blooms). Thinning is recommended.

‘Dorothy’ Poppy
Photo: D Acres of New Hampshire

We lucked into a double salmon variety of Shirley poppy, what Austinites call Dorothy poppies. They’re named for Dorothy Cavanaugh, a beloved member of the Austin Herb Society, who shared her seeds and plants with everyone in town. Each spring after the poppies have finished blooming, we shake the tiny black seed from the pods into a paper bag, seal them up in an envelope, and hold them over till November.

One spring, neighbor Eugene Kubelka spotted the pods and remembered how his mom, in Waco, would use the seed for her kolaches, a scrumptious and popular Czech pastry.

Weighing kolache recipes
Moving image: Texas Monthly

Herein lies the November dilemma. Most poppy seed kolache recipes (here’s a Croatian one) call for at least one cup of poppy seed. But that means foregoing practically a whole yard full of flowers! Is it worth it?

Each person must consult her own appetite, heritage, and soul for answers. As you deliberate, here are several more kolache recipes from Texas Monthly.

Consider: Rose Marie Miller of St. Anthony Croatian Catholic Church—and other cooks too—note that you may substitute cooked fruit or jam for poppy seed filling. Can anything substitute for blooming poppies in spring?

Monday, November 21, 2005

In the Wake of Wilma

Florida growers and gardeners, and florists across the Southeast are still weathering the effects of Hurricane Wilma.

Hurricane Wilma
October 2005
Image: Wikipedia

The third Category 5 storm of the season, Hurricane Wilma, had diminished to Category 3 by the time it sliced across South Florida October 24. That was plenty strong to inflict one billion dollars of damage to the state’s agriculture industry. Terry McElroy, speaking for the state Department of Agriculture, said, “We took another major hit ... on top of the $2-to-$3 billion in damage we sustained last year from the four hurricanes during a six-week period.”

South Florida is a center for citrus, vegetables, ornamental plants and flowering annuals. Dave Self, a nurseryman and secretary of a local growers group, reported, “The hurricane basically destroyed every [flower farm] structure between Stuart and Homestead.” Joe Celeberti, of Loxahatchie, said, ”“We got wiped out. Most of the greenhouses collapsed. We lost 100,000 flowers here.”

Elsewhere, plants that have survived are “getting leggy,” in pots, because the landscapers and big retail stores that would have bought them are cleaning up hurricane damage themselves.

Stephanie Herron makes fall arrangements
Petal ‘N Stem Florist, Beaufort, SC
Photo: Megan Lovett, for Beaufort Gazette

On up the Eastern seaboard, florists ran out of stock, no flowers or greenery—not even the old stand-by, leatherleaf fern, grown in South Florida. “You couldn’t get them flown out, you couldn’t get them trucked out. It was like a week of down time,” said one wholesaler in Walterboro, SC. Wilma disrupted “at least 2000 domestic and international flights” at Miami International Airport, the region’s huge floral transportation hub. Power outages also clobbered refrigeration systems, and it showed. One Beaufort, SC, florist complained that her daisy shipments “already look like they’re a week old, and they’re brand new.”

Flights are back on schedule now. Many flower growers have replanted already, and florists are replenishing their stock. It may take many years, though, to restore the region’s huge tropical trees.

Downed trees, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
Photo: Wilfredo Lee, for AP

Eighty-three acres of the Fairchild Tropical Garden were damaged. “Pinecrest Gardens is now down to about 10 of the original cypress trees”; this year’s storms wiped out five of them. “Before Wilma, horticulturist Craig Morell had secured 2,000 orchids in trees around the grounds.” He estimated that clean up and restanding trees would cost $75,000, “if we can get someone here to do it before they die.’’

The huge baobab at The Kampong of the National Tropical Botanic Garden also fell in the storm and now lies “covered with its own leaves and braches” to protect it from the Florida sun. It was “sown in 1907 from a Tanzanian seed,” fell over in Hurricane Cleo, 1965, and was first left for dead until “the late Catherine Sweeney, who by then owned The Kampong in Coconut Grove, hired a 70-foot flatbed truck and transplanted it to her grounds.”

The garden’s director, Larry Schokman, says every effort will be made to save the tree.  “The ashes of people and pets have been scattered beneath it, Schokman said, ‘so we can’t leave it down.’’”

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Flower Rota—Get with It

In places of worship across the world, flower guilds keep the social and spiritual “doors” open.

St. Paul’s Church
being decorated for Easter
Bedford, England
Photo: Robert Leggat

In the U.K. they’re called flower rota, in the U.S. flower guilds—the loose groups of mostly women who decorate their churches with greenery and blooms. The All Saints Church Ham explains this custom well: “We are anxious to add new names to the flower rota, as several people are no longer able to do the church flowers.  You do not need to be an expert in flower arranging - simply able to give a little of your time to make the church look welcoming and pretty. If you think you can do this, please contact Mary Gray (668204) or Melanie Melsom (668389).”

These small groups seem to require minimal organization—just someone to make a weekly phone call, perhaps, and remind Mrs. Thickett and Mrs. Barnfeather that their Sunday is coming up. Or Ms. Moss. That would be supermodel Kate Moss, who after public scandal and drug rehab has bought a house in the Cotswold and joined the flower rota of a local parish.

Flower Altar Guild, Holy Rosary
Toronto, Canada
Photo: Holy Rosary

Among social groups, these tiny service societies present perhaps the lowest barriers to entry (though we did have one irascible relative who purportedly was “fired” from the altar guild in her Lexington, Kentucky, church.) In the centuries when women were banned from the pulpit and even the deaconate, flower guilds were the only roles—other than bowed heads—for women. Alleluia, some things have changed though the problem of social isolation is still with us, whether incurred through celebrity, disgrace, or, in the case of our relative, eccentricity (R.I.P.).

For many years my mother was a member of the altar guild at her church. When her turn came to decorate, she would drive down to the old Haymarket (now a parking lot), buy inexpensive flowers, and then arrange them in oasis foam. For major holidays, like Christmas and Easter, all hands would be called in, to hang greenery or bunch white lilies around the crucifix.

Here is an especially fine account of a flower rota’s activities, written by Thirza Swindells from the Parish of Llandeilo Fawr in Wales. We cite it in full.

“Our small group of flower arrangers continued to ensure that there were fresh flowers in place for Sundays and festivals throughout the year (apart from the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent). On Sundays, there are flowers at the altar, pulpit and Lady Chapel with a small posy in the foyer. For the Festivals - Easter, Harvest and Christmas - we gather as a group and have additional arrangements in the windows. Last Easter, generous donations enabled us to make a lovely arrangement of lilies at the altar. With Christmas falling on a Wednesday we were able to decorate the church on the previous Saturday, enabling the congregation to enjoy the flowers during the Service of Lessons and Carols on the Sunday. For our Harvest Festival we were delighted that the Youth Group (GIG) decorated one window in a very original style!

Harvest Altar, United Reform Church, Wiltshire, England
Photo: Jim Downes

“It was with some apprehension that we contemplated another flower festival in July. However with the help and guidance of Gloria Davies, who chose the theme of Flowers of the Bible and made many beautiful and striking arrangements, and the generous sponsorship of members of Llandeilo Chamber of Trade, we enjoyed another very successful week. The Church ladies were responsible for the seven arrangements across the centre panels in the colours of the rainbow, God’s covenant with man after the flood. They also arranged the flowers in the porch and foyer which, together with the Llandyfeisant window, were in the Bardic colours (white, blue and green) to commemorate Lord Rhys as founder of the National Eisteddfod. A Gardening Club member made the lovely garlands for the gates.

“There is a flower rota in the porch on which we invite people to enter names. There are always gaps and, as a group we would like to encourage more people to join us. The more experienced of us are always prepared to assist beginners. If you cannot arrange the flowers yourself then donations towards the cost of flowers are always welcomed - perhaps for a special date you would like remembered? Church flower arranging can bring blessing to the arranger by providing a quiet, peaceful interlude and to the congregation by surrounding their worship with the beauty of God’s creation. If you would like to join us, please contact me on 01558 822494.”

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Ellerslie—New Zealand’s Week in the Sun

Low-allergy gardens, controversial plants, sci-fi designs—the biggest flower event of the Southern Hemisphere will rock your world.

Stevenson Garden Zone
Ellerslie Flower Show, 2004
Photo: Garden New Zealand

If you’re in the Western Hemisphere and boarding a plane right now, you may just be able to make the final day of the Ellerslie Flower Show. The 11th year of this major design expo, held at Auckland’s Regional Botanic Gardens in Manukau City, is expected to draw 75,000 visitors, 2000 of them coming from overseas.

Dr. Keith Hammett’s ‘Dark Tiger,’ 2003
Photo: Plants Magazine

Hoping to collect your $6 ticket, organizers have been a bit stingy with photos on the web, but here are some shots of last year’s event. To Northwestern eyes, the Kiwi gardening aesthetic is strange. It combines the big sky, grassy and gravelly effects of the American Southwest with tropical plants, angular metallic sculptures, and loud, loud color.  There are many bursts of brass and percussion, but no stringed instruments. Check out this star from the 2003 show: “the world’s first reverse Collerette Dahlia.” It took New Zealand breeder Keith Hammett twenty years to produce this flower, described by one news source as “pale amber” (giving you some idea of the Kiwi palette).

War of the Worlds, 2005
Photo: Kelly Schicker, Waikato Times

This year’s Ellerslie show produced two international stories. There was great excitement as three planeloads of exotic scented orchids arrived from Singapore, and great dismay when South Africa’s entry was barred for “biosecurity” reasons. The plants for David Davidson’s design ‘The Afrikan Dream’ weren’t permitted to enter New Zealand, because “there is no formal agreement with South Africa about the transportation of indigenous species.” Indeed, it would be terrible if a swarm of proteas overran Auckland.

Extending the militaristic theme, the grand-prize winning display this year featured “a surreal outer space setting,” a tripod ship and, apparently, two bunches on bean sprouts in capped plastic cups. The exhibit was titled War of the Worlds. We’ve come a long way from paradise gardens.

Ellerslie 2005 opened Wednesday and will close Sunday, November 20.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Hibiscus for Harriet

For her birthday, one of the world’s oldest animals celebrates with floral cuisine.

November 15, 2005
Photo: Australia Zoo, via Reuters

Harriet, a Giant Galapagos Land Tortoise never could much kick up her heels, but she’s looking magnificent for 175 years old. Her keepers at a retirement home in northern Australia celebrated the great chelonian’s birthday Tuesday with a delicious and healthy dessert, a cake made of pink hibiscus (though the cake designer rather tastelessly shaped the cake as a tortoise. Would you give a friend a baked effigy of himself?).

Some say that Charles Darwin himself “collected” this creature; others say that’s poppycock. Does Harriet care? Darwin is dead and Darwinism is under attack; meanwhile, she plods on.

Australian conservationist Steve Irwin owns the zoo north of Brisbane where Harriet has lived for the past 17 years. He pronounced her fit as a bass fiddle. “I can’t see why she shouldn’t live till 200,” Irwin said.

One reason for her longevity may be excellent meals. We don’t vouch for any tortoise dieticians but did find these warnings and recommendations. According to one source, some tortoises thrive on certain flowers, among them dandelion, hollyhock, globe mallow, roses, geraniums, and—what we hope is Harriet’s favorite—hibiscus.

Buen provecho!

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

St. Elizabeth’s Bread and Roses

A saint of Hungary was a bread smuggler, disguised with roses.

St Elisabeth
Image: Helmut-Zenz

It’s from Barbara Irwin, artist and friend, we first learned of Hungary’s floral saint. In an alcove of Barbara’s former house, we spotted an odd sculptural assemblage: the cement statue of a woman in a long, gathered apron, with a sugar-rose attached where her head should have been. Very spooky, very lovely.

“That’s St. Elizabeth,” Barbara explained, and told the story.

Elizabeth was nobly born in 1207. She also married nobly, to Prince Louis of Thuringa at age 13. Like Francis of Assisi, she wasn’t much for palace parties and the like. Rather, she enjoyed mortgaging the family castles to build hospitals for the poor, the kind of thing that royally annoyed the in-laws. As with so many hagiographies, we get more than a bit snarled up in the mortifications, switchbacks, and other biographical turns, but we have been looking forward to recognizing St. Elizabeth. As usual, flowers clarify the portrait.

It’s said that Elizabeth preferred plain clothes to regalia, and twice daily would leave home to deliver food to the sick and shut-ins, Meals on Wheels, minus the axles. Her family, wishing she’d cut all this out and behave more like a princess, confronted her one day as she went about her deliveries. They demanded to know what she was carrying so she opened her big apron, suddenly filled not with loaves but roses.

In some renderings she’s shown holding bread behind her back, while the roses in her lap serve as distraction. Our favorite image, however, is Barbara’s, though we understand the rose-head, which really had been sculpted of sugar, eventually melted onto the statue’s shoulders and breasts.

Elizabeth is the patron saint of (among others) the falsely accused, the homeless, nursing services, young brides, and bakers. This is her feast day, November 17.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

What Would Guru Nanak Do?

How do you celebrate the Sikh faith’s founder without getting orthodox about it?

In Jalandhar, a procession and pilgrims
mark the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak
Photo: Pawan Sharma, Tribune India

In a town west of Lahore, Pakistan, and other strongholds of Sikhism, the birth anniversary of spiritual founder Guru Nanak was remembered with celebration this week. In Nankana Sahib, this meant bearing a Pakleee, or throne of flowers, through the streets.

Such observances must involve a degree of irony, for-- from the little we have learned—Nanak himself rejected orthodoxies of all kinds. One might even call him an anti-ritualist. He was born into a Hindu family, but studied Hindi, Persian and Arabic with equal interest. As a child he was already asking big questions of everyone, Muslims and Hindus alike. Nanak—and Sikhism—seem to have developed in response to considerable religious corruptions of late 15th century India (imagine that!).

In his late 20s, Nanak disappeared while bathing and was taken for drowned. He resurfaced, illuminated, saying, “There is but One God, His name is Truth, He is the Creator, He fears none, He is without hate, He never dies.” Nanak spent the rest of his days traveling, learning, teaching, and renouncing—almost to the point of mockery—the dictates of established creeds.

Rather than a pious or dictatorial guru, Nanak inspired with surprise. On a pilgrimage to Mecca, he fell asleep with his feet pointing the “wrong” direction, towards the holy Kabba. “How dare you turn your feet towards the house of God!” exclaimed the watchman, kicking him. “At this Guru Nanak woke up and said, “Good man, I am weary after a long journey. Kindly turn my feet in the direction where God is not.”

Nanak tossed holy water of the Ganges not toward the sky, in accord with Hindu ritual, but shoreward.  “I am sending water to my farm which is dry,” he explained. “If your water can reach your ancestors in the region of the sun, why can’t mine reach my fields a short distance away?” He even cooked deer meat in a Hindu temple, telling horrified friends, “Only fools argue whether to eat meat or not. They don’t understand truth nor do they meditate on it. Who can define what is meat and what is plant? (In the same vein, our friend Barbara Stallard once wisely asked, “Are you so sure broccoli doesn’t feel pain?")

Guru Nanak (1469-1539) founder of the Sikh faith
with flowers and his companions, Bala and Mardana

One of the world’s great ecumenicists, Nanak challenged dogma of all kinds, professing love, equality and faith in an unknowable spirit—with a splash of wit. Among his legends is one especially germane to the Human Flower Project:

At the end of his life, Nanak’s many followers began haggling over who would be honored to conduct his obsequies. “Feeling his end was near, the Hindus said, ‘We will cremate you’; the Muslims said, ‘We will bury you.’ Guru Nanak said; ‘You place flowers on either side, Hindus on my right, Muslims on my left. Those whose flowers remain fresh tomorrow will have their way.’ He then asked them to pray and lay down, covering himself with a sheet.

“Thus on September 22, 1539 in the early hours of the morning Guru Nanak merged with the eternal light of the Creator. When the followers lifted the sheet they found nothing except the flowers,” all of them fresh.