Culture
The golden shower tree is the state flower of Kerala in India. The flowers are of ritual importance in the Vishu festival of the Kerala state of India, and the tree was depicted on a 20 Indian rupees stamp. The golden shower tree is the national flower of Thailand; its yellow flowers symbolize Thai royalty. A 2006-2007 flower festival, the Royal Flora Ratchaphruek, was named after the tree, which is most often called dok khuen orratchaphruek in Thailand. C. fistula is also featured on a 2003 joint Canadian-Thai design for a 48 cent stamp, part of a series featuring national emblems. Cassia acutifolia, the pudding-pipe tree, furnishes the cassia pods of commerce.
Read more about this topic: Cassia Fistula
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)