Having written the introduction to Eve Balfour, I discovered that a Findhorn Foundation Fellow, Angus Marland attended Eve Balfour’s talk at Findhorn in 1976. He told me about a particular memory that stayed with him: the story of a French monk who discovered that every rose has five sepals, two of which are hairy, two are smooth, and one is half hairy and half smooth. The full saying attributed to the monk, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), is as follows:

Five are brethren
Two are bearded
Two are born without beard
One of the five
Is not bearded on both sides. [1]

The leaves (or sepals) that are folded around the rose flower before it opens are called the calyx. The rose has five and they can be seen in Sketch A below. Little fringes grow out of the sides of some but not all of the sepals. In the saying above, the monk calls the five sepals “brethren” and the fringes, their “beards”. Looking carefully at the sketch it’s possible to see that two of the sepals have a fringe on both sides (are bearded), two have no beard, and one has a beard on one side but not on the other.

A: Sketch of the rose calyx with its five sepals, seen from below. B: Sketch of the arrangement of the sepals when the bud is partially closed. [2]

The fringes appear to be randomly different, but a pattern is revealed in Sketch B when the calyx is partly closed. Going round in a circle from one sepal to the next, a fringed edge always alternates with a smooth edge and vice versa in a regular arrangement. The differences complement each other.

The significance of the story is plain to see. Observation and close contact reveals differences not noticeable at first glance. Awareness grows as differences are revealed and diverse parts come together to make a coherent whole. Eve’s promotion of biological diversity in ego-systems was fundamental to her beliefs and her life’s work. So perhaps was her understanding of the need for cultural, religious, and sexual diversity in community.

[1] An Open Secret ‘The Calyx of Ipomoea purpurea’ by Reinout Amons From In Context #33 (Spring, 2015) https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/reinout-amons/an-open-secret
[2] Troll, W. (1959). Allgemeine Botanik. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlage

For the featured image I give thanks to Ssawka, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons