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An Evening Garden in the Sign of Virgo
An evening garden resembles the characteristics found in the sign Virgo. Things are hidden (in both Virgo and the night garden), the light is dimly aglow, and what crawls, hangs, creeps, and flies can hardly be seen, unless one has planted a nocturnal garden with flowers that scent the air. Then our eyesight does not matter as much for we are led by fragrance and the phosphorescent white milky petals lit by starlight. Often we are distracted by the sounds of, "things going bump in the night."
The nocturnal garden doesn't awake until twilight. This is that time in the evening, between this reality and that, when a changing of the heavenly guard takes place, when objects seem to glow internally, colors are different, and time has no reality whatsoever. Perhaps this is the "bewitching hour," that magical moment between two worlds neither day nor night, but twilight.
Virgo is much like twilight. It is said that the first glowing light of consciousness begins in Virgo. And that two lights are seen (daylight and night light), the light of form (bright yet dim) and the light of the Soul (dim but growing). The light of the Soul (which reveals God) is distinguished by a waxing of the one light (nightlight, Soul light) and the waning of the other (day light). Virgo, esoterically, is referred to as the sign of the Madonna, pregnant with the Hidden Soul (Christ, a state of awareness) consciousness. This growth of Soul consciousness is what is gestating inwardly (hidden in darkness) in the sign (month, native) of Virgo.
Ruled by the Moon and regarded as the Mother of all Forms, Virgo shields, nurtures, protects, and conceals, quite like the night, a new state of awareness. And like the nutrients of starlight, Virgo gathers all life experience (nutrients) necessary to further evolve her progeny (humanity). And all this is encased in the womb (cave of night), the place of hidden spiritual reality.
In Virgo, the personality and Soul are blended. The six pointed star is a symbol of this blending. In the night garden dark and light are blended. In the dark night, the light of the Moon and soft lights of the stars merge. And it is in the night that perhaps we are better able to think and to wonder about our place in this solar system whose overhanging tapestry, even in the dark night, consists of light.
To begin an evening garden one must learn what nocturnal flowers are available, what occurs in the night, and what living things decided millions of years ago that the world of night is where they would grow and glow, sometimes with the help of moths.
Flowers have a pronounced fragrance at night. Lilacs and roses and the peacock orchid (Acidanthera bicolor), with its six creamy white flowers blooming atop eighteen-inch stalks, came originally from Ethiopia. There is the delicate fairy lily (Chidanthus fragrans) from the Andes of Peru that, when cultivated, produces clusters of funnel shaped flowers, four inches long on stems a foot high. They smell like lilies of the night.
The night gladiolus (Gladiolus tristis), growing wild in ditches and swampy areas of South Africa, produces creamy yellow blossoms whose fragrance is spicy-sweet. They bloom in the midst of winter if potted and grown on a kitchen window. As soon as the night sky emerges, the flowers open like a pinwheel.
Members of the nightshade family produce flowers meant to be walked by, especially under Full Moon nights when the air feels warmly tropical. Their perfume is sweet and spicy and they grow into large shrubs up to eight feet high. The flowers are like trumpets hanging upside down. Two most famous ones are Datura and Lady-of-the-Night (Dama-de-la-Noche).
Other fragrant night bloomers are the Chinese gardenias, the creamy six-petaled magnolia, the orange jasmine with its bell-shaped flowers that blooms several times a year, golden honeysuckle, petunias, sweet William (Phlox), and from Minoan gardens (1500 BC), the Madonna lily (Lilium candidum). This last, like the sign of Virgo, was a symbol of purity in the medieval garden where great garden areas were dedicated to the cultivation of immaculateness. The Madonna lily stands six feet tall with fifteen fragrant flowers, looking like bells, perched at the top. Two more night bloomings should be considered for they are common to all of us. One is the tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa), which is noted as giving off sparks of silvery light "when the sun's away." And the other is the perennial moonflower vine which looks like a white morning glory. Grown up a trellis, lit by flickering candles or moonlight, moonflowers glow with the palest phosphorescent silvery green as if caught in the fire of glowworms or fireflies. Their smell is a blend of light incense and fresh lemon.
A Moon garden was planted some years ago in a hidden spot in Northern California. It's shape is circular and iron Moons are forged (like Vulcan's work) onto the gates leading into the garden. All color of whites -- shrubs, flowers, and trees -- are planted in spirals that lead to a center where slabs ofmoonstone embedded marble of varying heights meet hanging Tibetan bells. The wind rises in the afternoon and by twilight, the garden, overlooking a slope of land leading far down to the ocean, slowly shimmers alive. On nights when the night lights of moon and stars are bright, and when the wind is high, the garden comes to life with sound, movement, and color from creamy whites and pearlescents, to pale silvery greens and transparent golds. It's a secret garden planted only for the nightlight.
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