Thanakha and Flowers

Do the girls in Yangon and other cities no longer wear flowers in their hairs?

Is it outdated as in the case of tha-na-kha? I often hear about women folk giving tips to each other that wearing tha-na-kha would make your face wrinkle. I don't like to believe this is true and I don't think it is. Nevertheless, it is easy for my young opponents, girls in unisexual colored hairs and some knotting their hairs at odd angles, to dismiss me as an old timer.

More seriously, I have been wondering if that is some ploy of outfits that sell herbal cosmetics for defying age, herbal drugs for curing cancer or toning your body and mind—those that would convince you that these are just short of being the elixir of life.

But you can see that lighter or offensively colored hairs of girls these days would not go well with flowers. Just imagine a Myanmar bride wearing tha-zin pan (an orchid, Bulbophyllum auricomum or Bulbophyllum suavissimum, once tabooed for commoners) on her dyed hair.

I don't know if it is because wearing tha-na-kha and wearing flowers would make girls of today think of themselves looking like clowns. Nevertheless I would say that thanakha could be worn so thin as to be almost invisible but giving out its faint and characteristically sweet scent, and hair the color of padon (bumble bee) as we say or jet-black hair and flowers are made for each other.

Flowers at home minimally are offerings to Buddha for a typical Myanmar family. It is normally the wife or the daughter who removes withered flowers, cleans the stems and leaves and replaces freshwater for the flower pots as her first chore in the morning. I don't know if there are some flowers that are traditionally tabooed from offering to Buddha. I don't think so, because the rat (representing my day of birth, Thursday) appears in religious illustrations as offering to Buddha a clump of grass. On the other hand there are preferences. It is sure to find tha-byay (Eugenia, the flower of victory) sprigs, as a stand-by offering in addition to other showy flowers. For someone whose day of birth is Thursday, the Maymyo-pan (Aster) is one of the matching flowers. Padauk and Gangaw among the scented flowers would be in the offering as soon as they are in season. Padauk has a special significance because it flowers only in the month of Tagu and lasts only for a day, and it marks the time for the water festival.

These days you are sure to find orchid cut flowers, typically Dendrobiums in the offerings also. Yet, you will not see this flower with the stripes of a tiger, the kya-bahon orchid in the flower pots as offering to Buddha or on the hairs of our girls any time soon.

Is it because –

□       It is an exotic flower?

□       It rarely flowers?

□       It is too big for a flower pot or a girl's head?

Kya-bahon is not exotic. It is native to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. It was found in Taninthayi Division in Myanmar. You could expect it to flower once a year when it is of flowering age. But the flowers may be too big for the typical flower pots, or to be worn on the hair of girls.

We don't know if any of them exist in their native habitats any more in Taninthayi. How wonderful it would be for us to have a garden like Dok Mai in Thailand where the Orchid Ark project was initiated as an effort to preserve the endangered orchids of Southeast Asia.

Dr. Danell said that when the Kya-ba-hone thitkwa (G. speciosum orchid) on his left now 5 years old become twice that size when it is 10 years old, it will fetch 25-35,000 bhats in Thailand, so farmers would not hesitate to dug them up and sell them to the nearest hotel or resort. So it became critically endangered.

Eric: If we don't preserve all species in a forest, the forest is incomplete. It's a faulty ecosystem. We saw before plantation of trees. That's only one species, it's still not a forest. We need the mammals, the butterflies, the orchids, everything has to be together. Otherwise we have no forest left at all on Earth. We have plank plantations.

For me it's also heartbreaking to realize that we exterminate species. Thirdly for people who only think in term of economic terms, we are destroying fantastic chemical factories. You have orchids, plants, mushrooms, all capable of making chemicals that can be used medicinally and in various industrial processes.

Dr. Eric Danell has also explained what we should do to redress the issue and under what preconditions. You may want to hear the case for preserving orchid species and in general the complete ecosystems as made by Dr. Danell of Dok Mai Garden in Thailand on his YouTube video and decide for yourselves.