Designing a Botanical Garden
May 30, 2014 • Costa Rica Spiritual Sanctuary
This Spiritual Sanctuary in Nosara, Costa Rica, that we are creating was never going to be a job for just for my wife and me. It’s going to take a team of individuals that believe in the purpose behind it. My dear friend Tim Davies was one of the people that stepped forward to offer his help. As I had mentioned in a previous post he runs a very successful landscaping design company in Australia (Tim Davies Landscaping) and he flew over 30 hours to Costa Rica and worked really hard every day to help us with this project. That’s love!
I had a rough concept of the welcome center area of the sanctuary before we headed out there this last time. When Tim, my wife and I got together we went over in detail the kind of experience we wanted people to have when they came here.
Tim came up with a beautiful design that involved 2 intersecting arcs of trees as one makes his way from the welcome center to the Ganesha shrine. The 3rd image below shows you the locations of the trees that were planted and the locations of the them. The first arc is made up of Cortez Negro trees. These trees drop all their leaves at the height of their flowering season and are covered with gorgeous reddish purple flowers. We have six of them.
Then in another arc we planted 6 Ylang Ylang trees. The scent from the flower is amazing and is used in the Perfume Chanel No. 5. The flower is drooping, long-stalked, with six narrow, greenish-yellow (rarely pink) petals, rather like a sea star in appearance, and yields a highly fragrant essential oil.
You’ll have to walk on the path that meanders through these intersecting arcs of trees to get to the first shrine which is dedicated to Ganesha.
If you would like to know more about this project check out this page: Nosara’s Hindu Spiritual Sanctuary, Costa Rica. If you would love to be part of the project please email me at info(at)dandapani.org and share with me your thoughts.
Tim writes in some of the details on a plan of the sanctuary
The location of all the trees we planted that are located between the welcome center and the Ganesha shrine.
Putting in the final trees in the first phase of the project.
A very tired team that worked night and day to pull this off.
Time to relax by the beach and watch the sun set.
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