Flower Friday. : : Cana Lily

The leaves are the prettiest part of this plant with their green and pink stripes.  There is quite a stand of them outside our living room window. We cut them down to the ground every winter. The new shoots poke their heads through the soil in the spring and are full blown blooming plants once again within a couple of months.

My friends Jean and William, who live in Bali once brought their Balinese ‘brother’, Suda, with them in a trip to  Berkeley to visit Jean’s sisters , Lynn and Ginny, so that he could see how different life in The US was. Lynn had a beautiful garden filled with specimen plants some of which took years to grow.

One day the sisters went off on an errand leaving Suda to do some ‘clean-up’ in Lynn’s garden. In Bali, everything grows like our Cana lily, and gardening consists of regularly cutting everything down to the ground to keep it from taking over. At the end of the day Lynn returned to discover that Suda had used a typical Balinese garden tool...a machete...to cut just about everything in her beautiful and meticulously nurtured garden down to the ground...

It was quite a shocking sight, and Suda learned the hard way about the differences between Californian and Balinese gardening techniques! Cultural differences can have deep roots!

That was almost 30 years ago and Jean and William still have a wonderful business in Ubud, Bali, Threads of Life, which supports the artisan weavers of a number of different Indonesian islands. The roots of many Indonesian tapestry traditions are in the fact that the hand spun, dyed and woven tapestries represent the bridewealth of a whole village.

By encouraging the traditional methods, and selling the resulting textiles Jean and William are working with local weavers from several Indonesian islands to pass down the old traditions such as the double ikat patterns hand dyed and woven by the women of Tengenan.  Changing to cheaper dyes and faster, more mechanical methods, was starting to have a similar effect on the Indonesian textile industry to Suda’s treatment of Lynn’s garden.

I felt very fortunate to have been able to spend time with Jean and William in Bali, meeting the lovely Balinese people, learning about their extraordinary culture, and some of their unique ways of looking at life and to be able to participate in daily life with them.

Cultural exchanges can work both ways, but they have to be nurtured....