Thinning Unnecessary Trees
by Madhava Gosh
“When Maharaja Dasaratha, the father of Lord Ramacandra, used to fight with his enemies, it was said that he approached them just like a farmer uprooting unnecessary plants and trees.â€
KB 20: Description of Autumn
The landscaped area around the temple is beautiful, but artificial. When Srila Prabhupada was staying in the Grey House (which used to be across the state road from the back entrance to the Palace) he looked at the forest in what is now the temple area and said to cut down all these trees and make houses.
The forest was cut down and the earth was reshaped into the configuration it now has. Bulldozers used to run 24 hours a day for months doing the earth work. Where a narrow valley used to be with a gradually sloping stream, or “run†as they call them in West Virginia, a bowl was carved out that became two lakes and the excavated dirt was used as fill to create the parking lot.
After the shaping was completed, Aravinda headed up a crew that planted all the pine and other trees between the lake and the State Road. Pines are not native to West Virginia.
At the time they were planted, they were only a few feet tall. In order to make the installation look fuller, they were densely overplanted. The plan was that as they grew, they would be thinned out. In order to have the large size trees that make estates so grand, individual trees need space to spread out.
This thinning has unfortunately been neglected and is now long overdue. I am going to be working with a crew that will start to do some thinning out.
I know that some people have reservations about ever cutting any trees, so please contact me if you do, so I can take you out and show you why this is necessary.
Beyond that, anyone who is interested in helping with this thinning process, also please contact me. We need help identifying which trees to cut, the cutting, and the cleanup.
At this point I was considering piling branches up by the lake where we do the Ravana burning so we could have bonfires during the summer.
