Growing up with the Mother

The Game of Flowers

Finally, She brought us the ‘Game of Flowers’, in which She took great interest. The game was played exactly in the same way as the ‘Precious Stones Game’ with two sets of cards. One set was the picture of the flower and its spiritual significance. It also had the botanical and common names written underneath but which had no importance for the game. The second set of cards was smaller in size and carried only the spiritual name of the flowers. The small cards were placed in one heap in the centre with the face down. The picture cards were distributed equally among the players. Each player in turn would pick a card from the centre heap and whoever had the corresponding picture card, would take it out from his collection and put it down in the centre. The one who finished all the cards first, would be the winner. This game was meant to teach us the spiritual significance that She gave to the flowers. To begin with, the Mother gave us about 20 cards in which the pictures of flowers had been pasted or painted. Below, in Her own hand, was written the significance. A few days later She added more cards. All the artists of the Ashram were asked to paint new flowers, which kept adding to our collection. These paintings had to be done according to the dimensions of our cards. At the end of a few months we had almost 500 cards. When these were distributed to the players, each of us had more than 80 cards in hand. Playing with them regularly, we learnt to tell the significance of each flower easily. Through this game the Mother taught us to love flowers and understand them.

Cards from the Game of Flowers

Later on, the significance written on these cards served as the basis for the book, The Role of Flowers, edited by Lizelle Raymond. Through this game of flowers, I became familiar with flowers and developed a true interest in them. It is this interest instilled in me by the Mother that led me to ask Her in 1970 to work with me on an expanded version of Lizelle’s flower book. The result was a new book titled by the Mother Flowers and their Messages.

Since 1969, some of us had been discussing the possibility of bringing out a book on flowers with colour plates. Many ideas were put forward by those who were working on this project, regarding the write-up to be given under the name of each flower. One person wanted the quotations to be from Savitri, another favoured quotations from any work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and the third felt that we should print the book with colour plates of flowers with just their spiritual, botanical and common names, without any quotations at all.

I then put this matter before the Mother and asked Her to find a solution.

She said that since the quotations were not written specifically for the significance of the flowers they would therefore not be suitable.

The work on the book therefore got shelved for a while. At that time, I was working with the Mother on questions and answers on Thoughts and Aphorisms. When we came towards the end of the book in 1970, the Mother asked me what I would like to take up next. I promptly put forward the proposal for the book of flowers and She took it up enthusiastically. But She made the condition that She would need to actually see the real flowers before writing the caption explaining the significance.

Each day, I would spend all my mornings in the gardens collecting flowers to take to the Mother. The Ashram gardeners were a great support and started growing rare flowers so that the Mother could write about them. In their enthusiasm they even produced many new flowers for which they got seeds from all over the world. Some of these flowers were grown in the refrigerator, as they required special temperatures.

At the beginning the Mother Herself wrote everything in my notebook; later on She started dictating the comments. After taking down Her words, I would read them out to Her for verification. After working with the Mother in the evening I typed out the day’s work and passed it on to Richard Pearson and Richard Eggenberger who were working on the botanical and common names of the flowers for the book. Any question that we had during this work would also be taken to the Mother the next day for clarification from Her. The result of this was the book Flowers and their Messages. While working on this book, I also asked the Mother many questions on flowers. Not all the questions and answers and clarifications were included in the book Flowers and their Messages. We are therefore reproducing the questions and answers here as a separate section. But the innumerable questions and answers on clarification of colours, significances, and translations have not been included here as they may not make interesting reading for everybody.

The Mother also gave many new significances to flowers which were grown by the Ashram gardeners during this period, thus not only increasing the collection of our treasure, but also inculcating in us a love for nature.