I’m going to run over some herbs, with notation for you that you begin to invent upon them, use them, prepare the preparations, and get on with it. Lobelia is dangerous, but a very important herb, for rectifications. We are going to deal with it in the very near future as an herb. The gentian is extremely important. The Gentiana blue has skin disease eradication. Sunflower seed oils, and juices are extremely important for the eyes. And for digestion generally, but the eyes in particular. The oil of the pumpkin seed is vitally important for all glandular procedure. No Balkan or Hungarian person has ever suffered in any ancient age from glandular trouble, for the simple reason that they have never ceased, in centuries after centuries to occupy this method.
The echinacea for cleansing the blood stream: nothing to compare. The meadowsweet for beatification. The Polygonatum (odoratum) in the form of the common known Solomon’s seal, to repair bruises after quarrels and fights. The Tragopogan (goatsbeard) for all form of putting right to repair after illness. Digitalis, not any longer in particular, to put our numerous hearts right, but principally as a soil preparation against invasion of slug and matters. Absolutely harmless to plant life and probably would absolutely refute them. The ashes of burned Pteris, Equisetum, and sunflower stalks—Helianthis giganteus—particularly as a potassium, but more particularly as an anti- fungoid. So I’ve just run over that list to start an infusion of these matters, to regurgitate them.
The subject this morning, because the educative staff has said that it is high time that I am going to lead into the whole of the irrigation systems for the garden, so, the subject is that this morning. However, before that, if you’ll forgive, I have some what you might call some introductions. And the less said about them, the better.
The most wonderful journal that came out in England, partly through Schumacher—well, Schumacher was merely a descendent of the whole issue—but he was, as you know, the president of the Soil Association—this journal is a participation, the journal of the Soil Association in Great Britain, which is now almost defunct, all those people having become aged.
Rachel Carson1 said in 1963: I truly believe, that we in this generation, must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
A little paragraph; how it should be done upon agriculture. The opposite pole to the attitude of government advisors and tycoons, is that of Laurence Easterbrook. Speaking on the BBC program on “Your Farm” on the nineteenth of February, he discussed the various aims that a farmer might set himself: An ideal might just be, to become the best farmer in the country, or to breed the best stock, or to have a farm that gave you the least worry, or the most contentment. When I started, I thought about this a good deal, and came to the conclusion that I would take health as my ideal. I hoped that this would mean that other desirable things, such as profit, would automatically follow, if I could succeed in creating a healthy farm. I think after some years of experience, I think one could do much worse than take health as a prime objective. It means that you develop a habit of considering first, the welfare of all the living things in your care. Healthy animals. Healthy plants. And healthy soil. And the soil with at least a couple of million living organisms in every spoonful of it, is the most living thing of the whole lot. Shamefully little is known about the health of the soil. When it comes to animal health, I am in a one hundred percent revolt against the current theory—all too common in medicine as well—that life is an obstacle race with the bugs, and the most you can hope for is to squirt enough dope into them to hold disease at bay. I believe that living things in a healthy state have a natural immunity to disease.
He goes on a little further, but that’s the gist.
Albert Steffen: With this experience, it clearly began when strange plants fascinated me. I started a herbarium. At that time, I was taking my first lessons in Latin and assuredly it was no mere chance that I began to dry out the plants, just as I was learning the dead language. That I was in danger of rooting up my own instincts along with the plants eluded me at first. As I began to use the microscope, laying out the plant preparations on the rectangular slide, in order to study the cell structure, I noticed, for the first time, that I was becoming estranged from nature. The harm I suffered was revealed to me in a curious way.
One day, as I went out of the laboratory onto the street—I hadn’t passed my examinations in the meanwhile—I felt compelled to look for the wrinkles, warts, and all such disagreeable things in the faces of the people that I met. I bethought me involuntarily of various noses, blubber lips, and jaws with more or less decayed teeth, as they would appear under a magnifying glass. What use to touch or delight me escaped me now. The blue of the cheek, the violet of the eye, and above all: the spirituality revealing itself in gait and gesture. My barren soul was no longer aware of these things.
As Mr. Bailey and a number of other people would say as regarding irrigation, I can’t tell you the system in words.
I want us to discuss right now the matters that concern the key of the whole of this so that we look at it. There are many aspects that we are not truly conscious of, as Mr. Steffen describes there. We are focused out of line because of our own ordinations of focuses which are not in line with Nature’s. I go back onto some of our previous studies, and I draw your attention to something, and will leave it right there. We spoke of the energy that the Sun, as directed by its great leader—another Sun—directs its energy at this Earth. The energy comes out of this Earth, of the magnetic energy of the Earth, a separate volley, and meets it, and creates what we term, in language, ‘warmth’. Growing in the heat.
That is land, that concerns Earth. And you’ve already looked at some degree of the mantle, the clothing of the Earth, of this angelic procedure of plants. That informs an intermarriage-ship with the marriage-ship. Yes. Alright. So what happens in the ocean? As it were, the opposite of Earth. Now you begin to have a perception of what we’re talking about. Variation.
There you have the huge manipulator. It is, as it were, that the ocean is the opposite of the Earth, as the Earth can almost be described as the opposite of the air. Indeed you ought to look at this in a minute. So now I simply place this before you, and you must use your own scales of balances, and imaginations.
Reference then the dawn, and the coming of the Sun, and the land. “Com’on. All of you. Out. Meet. How are you this morning? Well, you’re well, I’ll tell you that. So you’re going to be well.” And it does the same to the sea. And when it does the same to the sea that it does to the land, in the same area conjunct, you get the word ‘maritime’. A marriage-time. Not violent either. A what you might call—to use horrible words again—a temperature equality. The oceanic reply to the Sun’s energy, and the Earth’s reply to the Sun’s energy are two opposites, but where they’re married they make a Cancer and a Capricorn, areas of equilibrium.
You leave the oceanic area, and you go over mountains inland, and that maritime becomes an abeyance, left behind, and now it is land replying to the Sun energy. And that is quite different. It is one-sided, so to speak. If you were to go a little further, would you not come to a wide river or a lake? And now what happens? Here is not salt water, with salt plants; here is sweet water, land water, with land water plants. They’re quite different. But again, you achieve a semi-maritime, outside the Capricorn and Cancer area, halfway out again, each way. A balance, but not as balanced as the coastal.
And here you find, as you get day plants and night plants, the variations of plants which co- habit in that angelic prevalence of distribution, their application. And their performance. They create the atmosphere. Where there is no river, no lake, no pond, no mire, no bog, the land issue is it own domination.
At the University of California (Santa Cruz), the professors who came to the garden to help the students to find out what to do—which of course was bound to be reversed—in the garden, the one thing that they always said was: “I really don’t know anything about gardening, I confess it, but, I’ll do the digging and I’ll do the watering.” Of course we said, “Now please, for God’s sake, leave that alone and do some gardening and then we should be safe.”
I want us to look at a further partition of the opposites we just referred to as regards ocean and land. We’ve put into groups those four Archangel performances that we nominate—let’s put it simply—spring, summer, autumn, winter. Now you make those same divisions, you must. Those seven variations to begin to understand this matter of the application of water, and the way in which Nature appropriates it, and that’s what we’ve got to follow. Nothing else.
Therefore, that divertissement is different from what is imagined, what is thought in the reason and intellect mind, which, don’t forget, is very precise, and predominant, and false.
Let us begin in winter. Because the winter is essentially more dark than light, we will refer to it as ‘night’. Out of winter let’s travel into what follows in the cycle, spring. What happens in the spring out of the middle of what happens in the winter? Does not light increase out of an over- formation of night? In the whole of winter you have the absolute, total holding of darkness, over light. It is predominant. In the spring, you work out of that predominance—but still within the predominance of dark—into light, until they are equal, and you pass out of it in to the reverse. And so you must send night into day, in the spring. And so you enter the summer, at which you must say, the whole of the period of Uriel is the predominance of light, and therefore it is utterly dangerous. For it is going to run away and blind. And then you enter the period that reverses that, in the opposite direction. That is what is complicated for us to understand, because it is utterly natural, and not connived. It is a very reversed happening.
Now if you put a motorcar into reverse after going forward, you’re not doing that at all. And in all our machinery, we don’t do that at all. And so we are stuck. Blocked and caught.
In this procedure then, out of summer into fall, you are on the very opposite to spring. You are going out of predominant light, but you are still in predominant light. And you are beginning to enter an approach, a warning of darkness. But the happiness, the evolvement, the vital violent hold, is still the predominance of Uriel, of light. A danger. Therefore you must nominate it ‘day into night’.
Here you have the first approach into the conversation concerning inhalation and exhalation. You might very well say, that the spring is an inhalation, for the first time, out of sleep. And the fall is not an inhalation at all, it’s an exhalation. You have already perceived that the whole of the plant world lives totally differently, with a totally different aspect, towards total Nature to what we have. We look at everything participle. But you watch and see, and observe at dawn, in the morning, in the evening all the plants, and it is the whole aura, area, of this stellation that is being looked upon. Therefore, you must give up—as we do, forgive my saying so, with the Bible4—write it as we feel makes it possible for us. We must give up making plants live the only way which we can conceive that they could or should. They must tell us this astonishing angelic magic by which they do this.
Therefore their whole breathing is a different consummation altogether. And although, in a certain sense, they are, in most cases palpitating faster than we are, they nevertheless do the periods of various inhalations, which we do—when you sleep you know something of what happens—the whole of that inhalation changes tempo. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t wake up as you do. You would wake up as you went to sleep. And you do not. You are opposite. The whole thing has become opposite. But you didn’t do it. You must look at that between spring and fall.
Now that inhalation and exhalation concerns the opposite that ocean and land does. That the soil, and the procedure on the plant below the soil level—the area of discontinuity of the Earth—where the dominance of the angelic stellation takes command over the physical procedure of ahrimanic, is, as it were, a complete opposite. So this truth, that you have an electric current in the atmosphere, and a positive and a negative in the soil.
Therefore you must perceive this procedure that takes place in day and night, as regards growth and breathing. There are the periods at which the foliages, the stalks and the blossoms breathe, and are facing like that, down, into. And the other is resting. It is only by a gradual change that that opposition takes place, of waking up. And then the other does the opposite. They also go in epochs, as we do. You do not sleep the same throughout the night. You would think you do, but that is only because you’re not aware.
There is a change all of the time in that, as there is in the présentement of the year, and a century—and many centuries are in great groups as the year is a group. And the twelve months are a group. You cannot limit by this construction of the calendar the whole perpetual procedure of Nature, which is perpetual change.
All of this is to get to an understanding of when to water. You would not awfully like, were you in the middle of your sleep, for somebody to come and pour a bottle of beer over your head. Or to put it down your throat. Or perhaps you would. Now you will see that there’s a huge falsity in the appropriation, that the plant is really for water both ends at the same time, always (root and stem). That is complete nonsense. The procedure through the month is not any quality at all. Nor, through the cycle of the year. Nor, in the upgrade of the inclination cycle. It is a continual change. So if you think you could have a beautifully hammered out system of watering every day, laid out in a book, you will see the ludicrosity of it.
You have noticed by now, and you must proceed to notice much, much more, those flowers which do that (turn upward and outward) the moment the Sun comes out and says, “Hello everybody!” And they say, “Hello Sun!” and they all do that, practically all of them. However, there are some, like the Nicotiana, it does this (turn downward and inward). “Get away, you beast!” So there you have these intrinsic opposites. So you can’t water all your plants with one great douche of the hose.
Now you must have noticed clover. Clover is one of the predominants of this matter, as are a whole bunch of them: Melilotus. All those do similar tricks. The moment a cloud comes over— whhaaaaa, must get ready for this—what? Ah yes, but why? This is not merely an instinct. It’s an obedience of an angelic procedure to the domination of the leaders of Archangels. The Archangels have said, “You know your duty, don’t you? Do it.” And all the angels say, “Yes of course we do.” And do it. It is because there is going to be a shower, and shower has to go to the roots, not the foliage—it’s daytime.
So these procedures, according to the plant, according to the area, are obedient, and they’re totally obedient. I won’t say that in some of the pernicious areas of the world—such as those we won’t nominate—things aren’t a bit deceiving. That’s rather unaccountable.
Now, I draw attention to what I said about winter, spring, summer, fall, and that matter of night; night into day; day; day into night. Now you may say if you like, you may take that into a bed, into a box. And of course you could say fall is evening, and dawn is morning, which is spring. And so now you also go into those opposites that come out of the middle every time. The middle of the ‘eye’. You will find this key throughout. That when the foliages and the blooms do this, which is saying to those four elements, “You behave yourselves, because we’ve got the whole thing under control.” And then they do that and they say, “Well, you can go ahead. We’re behaving. It’s all under control.” The moisture applications are going to where they should go, and the plant is performing its angelic obedience. You may very well say, that when the plants are open, and the leaves are exposed like this: over—no; under—yes. And likewise the reverse when they’re closed: over—yes; under—no. You’ve got your opposites there.
You must have noticed, when you don’t quite water the plants enough, they hold their leaves up above to get every bit of moisture you can put: “For goodness sake! Can’t you see? I’m holding up for you!” And then the moment they’ve got enough, or a little too much: “Ok, don’t you see I’m asking you to stop.” And it’s all right, of course they do. Normally.
Classically, we mustn’t proceed with this beyond a certain point. You understand, what I’m trying to do, is to lay before you horticultural truth that concerns Nature. Whereby you must find, on your own—as with total, proof, truth—what the procedure is.
Classically, the climate of horticulture is: warm, moist summers; cool to cold, dry winters; and in between. But if you live with that, you proceed on a classical line, for that is a classical climate. And all classical moisturing is done in the late afternoon, so that the plants can be able to breathe via the foliages, and shall have the roots also moistured, as required. And that it shan’t be dis-integrated obliquely, but shall have it’s full scope of period of play.
Now in this you must look at the growth in an orchard, for this gives it to you very clearly.
In an orchard in the spring the rains have fallen through the winter, and your moistures have made all the growth of that tree, in the spring and the blossoming, rich with lush moisture, for a chick coming out of an egg must have the white, and the air, to keep that moisture. Later, it will be abortive for the chicken to have moisture all around its feathers when it wanted to go in and lay an egg. It would be upside down and back to front.
With this orchard that is going to produce fruit and seed, it wants the moisture in the spring. In the beginning, in the uprise (spring sap rise), in the inclination. In the period of light, of totality of light, that must begin to over-balance into the opposite. And the whole attitude of dryth unto wet-th will produce what is known as exquisite flavor, taste, sugars, and ripenesses. For if you have those sugars, tastes and ripenesses in the blossom, you would have a fantastic mess. But the
Archangels do happen to know, and they’re terribly obedient to what they are doing.
That same application then concerns night and day, and the plants. Where you have got an un-classic climate, you have got to go into reverse. That’s the whole answer to that point.
Presumably for seed beds onwards, dusk to dawn is when the moistures should have been applied into the soils. Warmed by the coming out of the opposite. Therefore the sleep was in a moist warmth. But if, on the contrary, you have an un-classic climate, with nothing but coldth rising, then you have got a malevolence. Then you must have dryth at night, and moist in the day. But that is not going to suit the plants in the long run. Totally. You are living where you shouldn’t, and you have got to come to know it. And we shall always be told.
You will notice that seeds germinate principally in two periods: pre-equinox spring, post- equinox fall. There you have two variations of the lifedom of the plant life. You will find that in both of those periods, in what you call all classic climatics, the clouds are totally different to what they are at the rest of the year—they’re all in ordinance with the Archangels. They’re all behaving in obedience. You can’t regulate it. It’s never the same. And the whole stellation makes a slight variation all the time. The ordination of what shall be born and what shall not be born is not in anybody’s hands, except that divination.
Therefore, you will find that the cloud formations that fly at those two times are totally different. The spring clouds are low, very low, big sky nimbus, that come along, and when the little plant that is just beginning to hatch, suddenly is panting because of the young Sun energy saying, “Come on! How are you?” And the little plant says, “Well, I’m not quite sure. I’m getting a little bit exhausted. I am so tired.” And this Mrs. Cloud comes out between them and says, “Hey, pardon me.” And the Sun says, “Wait half a minute!” And it says, “Ooooo.” And suddenly the little plant is moist. And just as it is beginning to get moist it says, “Oh my God! I’m cold and wet. What the hell is this?” And the Sun hands a towel to him and says, “Here you go. What a fuss. Well, here’s some more. Come on Bergie.” And the next moment the Sun’s a bit strict again.
Those are the procedures that you get with those astonishing performances. Those are what you’ve got to deal with. The more you can water your seedbeds—the more frequently you can water them—with that kind of water, the more that you see the resultant performance. Therefore, you are again doing the opposites. And as we have found here in the aspect of this culture, you only water to dryth; and you only beg the dryth, that you can water. This can be a complex argument, as you might say, but it’s not. It’s coming out of the middle of the other, to meet it.
When you do prick-outs and plant-outs, do you realize that you have performed a huge duty that the Archangels perform, that the angels and the elementals perform? You are performing an angelic performance. Divination has created us to pop things in our mouths, and we have energy coming out of the ends of our fingers from that popping. It’s all a divination. When you eat you don’t destroy anything, you create. It’s a very beautiful, wonderful procedure. And if only we get
this right, and have the right attitude, what an exquisite thing it is, this energy from the popping. Don’t you see this is what plants do when they die. They’re full of giving. Absolute succulent-ness of the whole procedure. And so are we. Or can be…mon dieu…
Well, this prick-out and plant-out which many people would turn around and say, “What are you doing? Is that natural? I thought you said you followed Nature.” Are we really only meant to make alarm clocks? And aeroplanes? Isn’t it a perfect ordination, to drive some wonderful great cows out into a field full of herbs, which they wouldn’t have the sense to get to, if you didn’t do it? And so, it is the natural ordination. But Nature doesn’t do it on its own. And that’s the whole answer. The angelic quality of man is this obedience. The obedience to natural divination of artistry. An impulse, a come-forward. Therefore, that prick-out is an actual performance, that we perform. And you will see, astonishingly, that the plants actually enjoy it—although they collapse, to a degree, and seem to suffer a shock. The resultant is an improvement, and you see a huge happiness, for they love to be born, as you know, all close together, and breathe together. And then they begin to say, “Well now, this is a bit much. I mean, it was very nice when we were three days old, but it’s now a week and you’ve got to get out. So get down!” And they don’t all succeed, in fact almost none of them sometimes succeed; as participles all require something. They absolutely require…they require…they require what? Your reaction. Us. Our obedient duty. And so you must prick it out.
Now when you’ve done it, you’ve also got to know what to do having done it. The whole artistry has go to be, proceeding with it. And that artistry is that you must not use the human sympathy that you would use on a motor car, when you press down on the starter, or making the ice cream and putting it in the refrigerator. It’s not the same bag at all. You’ve got to say to the plant, “You and I know all about this rotation. And I’m going to help you. And you will see, because you know. Don’t you?”
And so, when you put it in the bed, you will give it enough water for two or three days, to make it start to be at home. Then you will leave it to the stars and the elements to perform their mercy. After that you will enter the scene and say, “Well Gibbs, how are you this morning? Are you ready to get going?” And they say, “Yes! Yes!” “Well so. Here you are. Squaak!” And away they go. So you must remember this thing: the moment that you see a plant when you prick it out, this mad sympathetic thing, it is us that’s got to be put right.
Now we spoke something about this watering procedure, about the plant growing: during that growth period that comes—and again we must put things now in their proper positions, not
the utilities—the growth, the procedure of annual, biannual, perennial, and you know we spoke the other day about buds in trees with doglegs, and that explained a whole lot I’m sure. That out of a child on a tree, of which there are millions, the next year come children out of that child. You see, it’s the whole difference of this angelic procedure of plants. It’s extraordinary, fascinating. And the same on plants as trees of course.
And so, when they’re budding up—and you know now what I mean when I say budding up— they want all the fruitious-ness on the irrigations of the spring. If they’re of that variety, if not it’s the fall which is the opposite. And therefore they must have this performance.
Now I draw to your attention to this matter. We spoke some time ago at one of our studies here about certain flowers such as the Daphne, the Scillas, and those endless little blooms that come when there is obviously no effect of the Sun bringing it about. It is absent. And you realize that it is more planetary than the Sun. As you get late in the fall, considerably. The Sun is no longer the total master. The other planets are now having a say in the exposition.
Now you must perceive a very fascinating matter and it concerns the growing of seed enormously. I’m rather deviating from irrigation here, but it does connect with it. You must look at the quality and the quantity of light. Which is forever throughout those four cycles changing perpetually in the same way that I described night; night into day; day; day into night; night. So you have got to look at light, quantity and quality.
Now you see why it is in the summer you have to shade those qualities and quantities, for the angelic bloomings of anything are destructive. If you take anywhere in some of these regions, you will get a disruptive of intensity of quality and quantity, which in the tropic on the equator, you will not have any of at all. You will have a beautiful equilibrium. Those places where the temperature, which has a certain amount of conformity in its nominality over this matter, is always between seventy-five and eight-five, never below and never above. The Seychelles, where the coco de mer, the double coconut, takes ten years to form, from its birth to a nut. And three years to germinate. Do you begin to see?
Therefore, your watering procedures must look into this realm too. As your flowering comes into play, according to your horticultural manipulation, so can you formulate the mathematics. Retard, or increase them. You will give your plants, absolutely as much, possibly a little more, of the moistures, of excitement. And they will sense that there’s going to be a procedure. They will know. And that when the blooming—which is what you’re after—in the flower bed—oh, but not in the French bean. No, you’ll want to hurry that over; you’ll want the bean to come. You want the seed. So you’ll apply water when it’s in bloom. But in the flower bed where you want the flower to stay, and you don’t want Mrs. Simkins to come next week and find the whole flower border over, or she will say, “Well, I’m not putting any money in this.” And so, you would hold your water up and the flowers will stay there for week after week after week. And they’ll say, “Well my dears, we’re in no hurry at all. We’re really enjoying it here enormously. It’s a nice holiday.”
In the bean bed you’ll say, “I’m not having any of that holiday business with you, my dears. You’re going to get on with this and I want some beans.” So you will apply (water), and it will rush over and produce beans. Now if you want those beans for seed, and not to cut up green to eat, you don’t want that. They’ve got to have the oils, the varnishes, and the veneers out of the Archangels’ nominations. You must remove your artifice—artistry—and allow them to lead into the orthodoxy. Then your seed is telling you its leadership. Now you see there’s a difference in crops, and the production of seed, in that direction. That is appropriation of obedience, of observation.
You will see that just as you go to a hen, and you say, “Dear hen, you laid twelve eggs and hatched them into chicks last year, if I give you some nice food, and some water, and a roof over you, will you lay me twelve more eggs?” And the chicken says, “Well, if the ordinance says yes, of course I will.” And you go see (a milking cow), and you say, “Will you give me a gallon of milk extra if I pumped you?” And it says, “Yes, of course I will.” And so you get all these things. So it is an ordination of obedience.
Now you see when you come to your herbs, you see which way you’ve got to turn. You’ve got to tell yourself to keep your artifice and your artistry within bounds. Put your hands behind you and give it up. And then you must fulfill it. For the herbs, like the seeds, have got to be absolutely obedient to the four Archangels. If you place a great deal of your desire—and will—in place of your destiny, they aren’t going to have the same instruction to it. They’re going to re-reflect your instruction that you give to them. If the plant is entirely in its own domain it will reflect the Archangelic content of procedure to us.
Whenever you plant new trees, they should be watered on planting, regardless of the soil. Let us begin to, as with strikes, extract air. Keep air under control. Later you want some air to the roots. When you first plant you should give plenty of water in the beginning, and indeed every week, regardless even of rain, very often, unless it is heavy rain. Normally speaking, especially in what you would call dryish summers—I’m not talking about total dry summers, I mean dryish summers—certainly water once a month to any trees planted that year, or the former fall. Now you must see how imperative it is whenever possible to put all trees and plants—and even seeds—in the fall, do you see. Day into night, into night, is so absolutely opposite to night into day, into day, where everything runs away. Do you follow? You have got a root, an ahrimanic hold over the luciferic. In other words it is far better to have a good pair of legs, than a very wise head.
As regards watering, there are two scorches that are prevalent—we’ve just mentioned one, which is the Sun scorch—which is quality and quantity of what we call heat. It’s the Sun energy and the Earth energy, that if you’re in certain areas like this, which is a frost pocket and a Sun pocket, in opposites, you are going to get what is called Sun scorch. The quality of the Sun is too much for the angelic quality of bloom. Of any bloom. Likewise the element of wind does likewise, and you will get scorch. At both of those times, and within the areas of those periods, watering is malicious. For the plant will breathe more and more, will be more what you call open to recipiency, and will suffer infinitely more.
If you study the fact that if you remove a tree during its growing period and plant it, you will inadvertently, however much water you give it, observe that within a few days, the leaves will wither, perish, and shortly fall off. And as you know, every idiot laments, goes on their knees and begs for forgiveness for having done an idiotic thing. The latter is excusable, but the former is ludicrous. The answer is that if the leaves did not wither and fall off, the shrub would. And the leaves, being beneficent, and fulfilling the obedience of their angelic procedure, whither happily, and fall off. In order that origin respect, more origin all the time, goes back through seed into the invisibles.
The temperature of waters. When one spoke of the ocean and the land, one has put the key on the table. If you go from there, as you will go from your classic sonnet, you will see that everything else follows out of it. Origin position that contains utmost energy. In the divertissement out of that first position, is a division of that energy. Until it becomes so diverse, as with hybridization, you will have nothing, almost. Almost. I suppose it’s impossible but sometimes it appears to be true.
Oh yes, temperatures of waters. So you realize that whenever you have formations of intensities in the glass house, your water content must be within there (that temperature range). Thereby it is held. Not that you wouldn’t do it someway else, and bring it in, but then it wouldn’t be suitable. Not convenient, not economical. But when you have frames that are not an outdoor procedure, where you have any covering over anything—and the whole of the procedure of horticulture is a covering over something, as an intensive bed is!
Now you begin to see that this temperature of water is utterly, and vitally important. The ocean, to the land, is absolutely important. And you see what one was referring to about rivers, about lakes, about water with horticulture. It’s always been said in classic horticulture, you can make as many artificial fountains, as many artificial waterfalls as you like, but somewhere something in the sylvan doesn’t ring. The bells don’t chime, and the flutes of Pan are not sounding. You look and you say, “Yes. Yes, it’s very pretty. Hmm. But there’s something not there.” It is obviously an in to out, otherwise, this is out to in.
The whole procedure of water connected with horticulture is an indescribable magic. It pervades the environnement. The very insects, the dragonflies, the plants, all become enriched, and part of environnement and atmosphere. Therefore it is very important that it is this that brings about temperament, maritime, temperate performance. If you had a lake just here, right now, you know as well as I do, how warm, how wickedly hot the Sun is at noon—it is as hot as you would ever want in the summer. And you would say, “Please don’t get any more. It’s a bit outrageous even now.” And the whole of that water would warm up, and if you sprayed it all over your beds they would all go, “MMMMMMM,” like that and the scent would come out, and the manure would start to steam. And so would we. On the contrary, what do we do? This ice water comes up from this ahrimanic devilment, and you spray it on as they’ve been doing this morning, and all the seeds which were about to germinate go, “O my god!” And they all jump up, and you got them acting the opposite of what you want. So this temperature of water is absolutely vital, absolutely vital. There’s no pretending with this. It’s really far better to put only one-twentieth of the seed in, and go out with a warm water can. Because you will get a result. The other way you won’t get a result. Until the intermediary of the absolute minimal of an area’s capacity says to you, “Well, you can go now boys. But you’ve only got ten days, so hurry!”
Well now, I mustn’t keep you any more. Have you got any questions?
Q: If you collect rain water in barrels or cisterns or something, how long could it maintain the quality of rain water, I mean rain water works much better than…
How like you to ask such a question. Ever since my own personal upbringing, wherever we were, whatever the roofs were, we always did this. And believe it or not, we even drank the water off the roof, regardless of birds and other things, people weren’t quite so pedantic then as they are now. As far as I know, it remains permanently. You know we’ve often said here, what is fresh air? What is fresh water? Do you see? Do you not realize that the very stars, the whole changes that are going on with the Archangels all the time are manipulating water? They manipulate the air; they manipulate the water. Do you see? Of course there’s no question if you keep water for six months in a tank, you would say it would go stagnant. But I would tell you we have someone from New Zealand where they must do it I’m sure, but in Australia you probably know, where they have no water for such a terrible long time, they will drain all water off the roof when it pours as it does here as you know for a hundred inches in three days. They have nothing but enormous concrete tanks under the houses. I mean it goes right down to Beelzebub. These things fill up, and all the
frogs are in there, and the newts, and you can hear them at night, croaking like mad. And for some months they use that supply, and drink it without any purification at all. I must say I was very bewildered with that and rather questioned it.
Q: Was that ever done horticulturally, for frames or glass houses to collect the roof water?
Always! Never not, in the days of sense. But they have gone. Every glass house every tool shed, had a roof with a gutter, with a barrel. Rain water is…it is again angelic, do you see? And again this monstrosity today, you see, money rules everything. If you can have a pipe and a pump that you don’t know where it comes from, that’s the whole answer to go upon. Do you follow? As long as you can pay for it, that’s the importance. And the whole country pays for it, it’s so clever.
Archive ID: CA1058
Type: Audio
Title: Irrigation
Date: 30 Mar 1977
Location: Covelo Village Garden, Covelo, CA
