TODAY

Every month of Myanmar Lunar calendar has designated flower of the month. Tagu, the first month of the calendar has the designated flower Gantgaw (Mesua Ferra Linn) Iron wood. Its bloom has white petals of three or four with yellow fragrant centre full of pollens. It is sacred because four Buddhas – (1) Mangala Buddha (2) Sumana Buddha (3) Revata Buddha and (4) Sobhita Buddha were enlightened under it. So Gantgaw tree is one of the Bodhi Trees. Buddha images are made of its wood. Gantgaw grows wild or is cultivated across the country. The campus of Yangon University is called “the land of Gantgaw” because many Gantgaw trees are grown there. There is a man-made Arborca called Gantgaw Ta-htaung (One thousand Gantgaw Trees) Buddhist monks conse-crated it as religious Sanctuary. Gant-gaw is a medicinal tree which herbalists use in their medicines.

Gantgaw

But most popular and commonly recognised as Myanmar national flower is Padauk (Pterocarpus Macrocarpus) which blooms only once in a year, at the time of new year Festival “Thingyan”. Therefore Padauk enjoys the pride of place in Myanmar culture. Like Gantgaw, Padauk is also a Bodhi Tree under which Tissa Buddha was enlightened and attained Buddhahood. So it is a sacred tree.
Padauk grows wild or cultivated by simply planting its branches in the ground during rain. Padauk grows to the height of 60 to 70 feet and its girth ranges between 7 to 8 feet. It is a kind of hard wood. There are four main species – (1) Myanmar Padauk (2) Andaman Padauk (3) Malay Padauk and (4) India Padauk. Myanmar Padauk has pale reddish colour with stripes and chequered pattern. Its wood is used in making cart wheel, boat frame, harrows, ploughs, oil press, posts, furniture, decorative walling and flooring and planks. Myanmar traditional harp is made of Padauk wood. Because of its fragrance and healing properties Padauk is used like Thanakha facial make up. Padauk is a hardy tree. Cut its branches and plant them in rainy season. In no time green leaves peep out of them. Today among many timber woods, Padauk comes almost next to Teak in foreign Market.

Padauk is the favourite flower in Myanmar litera-ture and visual arts. In Sanskrit Padauk is called “Bigaka” meaning the flower pertaining to the power of success. In Pali it is called “Patathalan, meaning the flower of gold colour. In stone, ink, clay tablet inscri-ptions and writings of Bagan Period of Myanmar history Padauk is often mentioned “Pyataung” “Pyatauk”.

Myanmar people of both genders adore Padauk flowers. They offer them to the Buddha and nat shrines. Padauk bunches are artistically and profusely arranged in a silver bowl to welcome Thingyan Festival. Young men would climb up high Padauk Tree to pluck bunches of flowers to present to girls as love overtures. Women like to deck their hairknots with many Padauk blooms to look beautiful in public. All vechicles are fragrant with Padauk flowers festooned above the travellers’ seats during Thingyan Festivals.

One noted poet of Konbaung Period U Kyaw composed the following poem on Padauk.

Padauk

ပိေတာက္ပန္း

လတန္ခူးေပမို႔

အလွထူးပါဘိ

ျမျမဖူးရယ္တဲ့ ခိုင္ေရႊ၀ါ

တကယ္တမ္းသာျဖင့္

ဘယ္ပန္းေသာ္မွ စံမတူဘု

နႏၵ ဖန္ဂူထိပ္မွာလ

ပေစၥက ေခၽြးေတာ္သိပ္ရတယ္

ေအးရိပ္သာယာ။

တစ္ႏွစ္တြင္ သည္တစ္လေပမို႔

တစ္္လတြင္ တစ္ရက္တည္း

ခက္ခဲတဲ့ ရက္ဗုဒၶါ

ပြင့္ရွာၾက စံုၿမိဳင္တြင္း။

ျမဴမင္းလြင္ထန္

ၾကဴသင္းတာ ခ်ိန္ယံမေတာ့

ေရႊ၀တ္ဆံ ငံုတံေညွာက္ကယ္ႏွင့္

ခါသႀကၤန္ ဂိမာန္ေရာက္ျပန္ေတာ့

သိန္သေရ ထိန္ေ၀လို႔ ေတာက္တဲ့ျပင္

လမ္းတစ္ေလွ်ာက္ သင္းပါဘိ

ဆန္းသေလာက္ မလင္းႏိုင္ဘု

ပန္းပိေတာက္မင္း။

Padauk Flower
In the month of Tagu
Bunches of green hue
Buds and yellow gold flowers
Padauk, peerless among all flora
At crystal Cave Nandamu in glades
Saint monk rest to relax under its shade
This only month of the year
For only one day, so rare
Are your blooms in the forest
For all beings under you go to rest.
Heavy haze and mist may come
Yet gold pollens of buds and blooms
are in full run.
Thingyan arrives in season gein-man
Your glorious beauty brightens the path way your fragrance being wafted astray.
Impossible to describe all your wonders
you sure are Padauk yonder”.

In prewar days there was one modern hit song sung by a famous film actress named May Shin . It is named Shwe Warr Hphoo (Gold yellow flower)

၁။       ထက္ေကာင္းကင္မိုးမ်ားက သြန္းလား

ရြာမယ့္ ေရႊမိုးကိုေစာင့္ကာ

ပိေတာက္ၿမိဳင္ သင္းပ်ံ႕လိႈင္လို႔သာ

ပံုထူး၊ ငံုဖူးလႊာ။

၂။       ပယင္းေရာင္ ၀င္း၀ါေျပာလို႔သာ

ေရႊမိုးကို ကိုးကာေနရွာ

ပြင့္ဖူးလႊာ မိုးကိုေမွ်ာ္ကိုးကာ

ေစာင့္စားေနရရွာ။

၃။       ေဟမာ ရဂံုနန္းမွာ ပြင့္လန္းေနခ်င္တာ

ေပၚလာ ကိုေရႊမိုးရာ၊ သေ၀ထိုးကာ

လွည့္စားလို႔သာ ေနအားတာ။

၄။       ခ်စ္သူပန္းပြင့္လန္းဖို႔ရာ၊ ကိုယ္ေရႊမိုးကို

ေမွ်ာ္ကိုးမိတာပါ

ေအာ္ ေအာ္ ေအာ္ ေအာ္

ပြင့္လန္း တင့္ဆန္း ရႊင္လန္းဖို႔ရာေလ

ကိုယ္ေရႊမိုးရယ္ မိုးရယ္ ေမတၱာေရသြန္းၿဖိဳးပါ။

၅။       ကိုအမၺန္ေမာင္ရာ ဂ်ိဳးဂ်ိမ့္ဂ်ိမ့္ညံကာ

စိုးစိမ့္စိမ့္ ျမန္မၾကာျဖန္းေစခ်င္တာ

ေပၚလာႏိုင္ခဲတာ သြန္းပါမိုးေဒ၀ါ

ေမွ်ာ္ရွာသူပန္းတာ ယိမ္းယိုင္ႏြမ္းေနတာ

ကိုအမၺန္ေမာင္ရာ၊ ဂ်ိဳးဂ်ိမ့္ဂ်ိမ့္ညံကာ

မိုးစိမ့္စိမ့္ျမန္မၾကာ ျဖန္းေစခ်င္တာ

၆။       ေရႊ၀ါဖူး မိုးေရဦးကို အထူးပင္ေစာင့္ေနရွာ

ၿမိဳင္ေဟမွာ ရဂံုမွာ လန္းပြင့္ဖို႔ရပါ။

1. Waiting for the showers from sky
Padauk forest is scented so high
cute buds and blooms with yellowhue

2. Anticipating you Mr Rain overdue
Amber blooms are in vain to see you.

3. To refresh and enliven my lover’s flower

4. Mr Rain is awaited for hours and hours.
Dear Mr Rain, pour down your Kind
blessings

5. With thunder, lightning and all your
dressings
You’re so elusive and evading
Making me so sad and depressing

6. Yellow gold buds long await first showers,
To adorn the forest with scented flowers.

Sithu Dr Khin Maung Nyunt