TODAY

Jasmine, a fragrant white flower of vines or shrubs of genus “Jasminum” is native to Asia. Widely used for adorning hadd knots or garlunds around neck or spary or arranged in trays. Because of its white colour and excellent fragrance jasmine flowers are the favourite of all social classes of all cultures – royally to the grass roots.

In Myanmar culture, jasmine is listed in the class of royal flowers. It is also designated as flower of the month of Nayone, the third month of Myanmarlunar calendar corresponding to June. A variety of jasmine grows wild or culticated in almost all parts of Myanmar. Some are shrubs of up to four feet and some are vines. Different jasmines are given different names. 1. Sabei Gyi for bigger blom with stronger fragrance 2. Sabei Kyet Yone for smaller with pointed petals. 3. Taw Sabei with only one layer of petals and delicate scent that grows wild in the country sides or on the fence of your garden. It is a vine of quite high shoots and blooms are sprouged. 4. Oh boke Sabei – a bunsh of many blooms shightly pinkish, growing wild in luck yards. 5. Zun (probably derived from Hindi word Zu-hi) small white bloom with one layer of petals and very pleasing fragrance. It is a shrub trpe mostly cultivated in background for marketing in early morning buzaars. There is yet another jasmine species called hsei phalu (Nyetanthes arbor-trislis). It is a shrut of pretty high almost a tree Branches are pliant. Blooms are white with one layer of petals with orange pedicels Herbalists use them in traditional medicines. Essence of jasmine is used in perfume and aromatic therapy not only in Myanmar but also in other cultures.

Myanmar history, hiterature and sengs have given pride of place to Jasmine. It is offered to the Buddha became of mits purity of white colour and pleasant inmcent scent, Ladies and even young men wear jasmine on their hair knots or ears. At ceremonical weddings, youlands of jasmine flowers are put on teh necks of bride and groom either by the master of ceremony or VIP couples present on the occasion. In literature and songs, a girl’s lover is likened to a garland of jasmine or a jasmine bloom worm in her hair not. Similarly a young man would use jasmine garland as a metapher for his lover.U Ponnya, famous poot can playwright of lake Kanbung Period of Myanmar history (1852-1885 AD) composed many poems of which the following is his best on Jasmine.

Jasmine

ပန္းစံပယ္ပန္းစံပယ္နန္းလယ္မေပၚခိုက္ဟာမို႔

အလိုက္ေတာ္ တန္သင့္ရံုပ

ခံပြင့္ကိုကံုး

နန္းရေ၀ မန္းေျမမွာ

စံပယ္လိႈင္ေတာ့

ခံပန္းခိုင္ ယာယီေရြ႕တယ္

ေတာေလ့ရြာသံုး။

Jasmine

Jasmines haven’t yet appeared in Palace,

For count ladies’ hair knots to embrace
Garlunds of khan blooms strung filtingly,
To adarn hairknots of all fair ladies
Now, it’s season of jasmine flowers
Mandalay count enjoys jasmine showers,
So Kham gardens are back to country side.
For rural custom to adorn with delilght.

Sithu Dr Khin Maung Nyunt