LANDSCAPING PROJECT
GLOBAL WOMEN’S CENTER FOR PEACE & ENLIGHTENMENT

Ojas Mandir is Mother Divine’s beautiful new Maharishi Vastu® architecture residence at the Global Women’s Center for Peace and Enlightenment.

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After you step through the entrance gate, marked by simple beds of seasonal grasses and perennials in vibrant red, orange, and yellow, you begin your journey in the northeast corner.

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Leaving the asphalt for a stone path, you enter a garden that feels cool, restorative, and gently alive. An herb garden gathers around you in layered greens: soft silver sage, feathery dill, upright rosemary, glossy basil, and low cushions of thyme. Their textures shift from velvety to needle-fine, and their scents rise as the leaves brush against you.

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As you continue north, you enter a cool shade garden alive with perennials and shrubs. Variegated leaves patterned in cream, silver, soft green, and deep forest tones brighten the filtered light around you, while ferns and broad-leaved plants create a lush mix of fine, rippled, and glossy textures.

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Fragrant shrubs and scented perennials release gentle notes into the air as you pass. Looking north, you see a dense planting of evergreen trees forming a rich green backdrop that screens the parking area beyond and keeps your view enclosed within the garden.

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When you reach the northwest corner, the path opens to reveal a butterfly garden filled with more sun-loving plants than shade plants. Bright drifts of nectar-rich perennials rise in gold, violet, coral, and white, warming in the sunlight and releasing a faint honeyed fragrance into the air.

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Butterflies drift from bloom to bloom, their wings flashing orange, blue, yellow, and black before briefly folding into stillness. Bees hum among the flower heads and grasses whisper in the breeze. You feel the sun on your shoulders and the warmth rising from the path, while petals, fuzzy leaves, and slender stems create a lively mix of textures at your fingertips.

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Between the planting beds, pockets of micro clover flow as a soft, low groundcover in place of conventional lawn, weaving the garden together with fresh green texture. Along the cooler edge, the air becomes moist and still around ferns, variegated leaves, and low groundcovers settled into filtered shade. The contrast between the bright, fragrant flowers and the cool shaded foliage gives the corner depth, movement, and a gentle pulse of life, drawing you westward.

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Along the west side, you move through part-sun perennials and shrubs that layer color, fragrance, and texture in the shifting light. Around you, flowering perennials rise among variegated foliage and softly branching shrubs in drifts of silver, fresh green, violet, white, and muted rose.

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You see fine leaves, broad foliage, rounded shrub forms, and low flowering groundcovers weaving together around scattered stones. Here and elsewhere along the route, pockets of micro clover spread between the plantings as a flowing groundcover rather than lawn, creating soft green transitions from one garden room to the next.

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Drawn westward, the path loosens into a quiet clearing of rock and gravel, where handcrafted wooden benches rest like sculptures within the landscape. Their broad, weathered seats invite you to pause, reflect, and observe. From here, the layered plantings settle into the wider landscape, gently preparing you for the stronger rock formations ahead.

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At the southwest corner, you enter a sculptural passage of clustered boulders and narrow crevices shaped by the principles of sacred geometry. You notice the stones arranged in a quiet rhythm of circles, angles, and repeating proportions, echoing the directional pattern of the larger garden and suggesting balance between earth, movement, and place.

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Low plants tuck into the gaps, softening the geometry without concealing its strong forms. As you follow the path through the rocks, this part of your journey feels grounded, contemplative, and elemental before it opens toward the sunny southern beds.

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Turning east along the south side, you enter the brighter abundance of the cutting garden. Beds unfold before you in long, colorful drifts of coral and crimson, buttery yellow, clear white, lavender, and deep blue purple.

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Tall stems sway above softer mounds of foliage, while rounded flower heads alternate with spikes, disks, and delicate sprays. Around you, papery petals, fuzzy leaves, sturdy stalks, and seed heads catch the sun.

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Looking south, you have views of the community vegetable garden, extending the cultivated landscape beyond the flower beds. The repeating colors carry your eye and your path onward toward the southeast.

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In the southeast garden, you watch the flower beds open into a fruit tree grove. Trunks rise from meadow-like groundcover around you, their bark textured with silver, brown, and mossy green.

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In spring, you pass beneath a canopy cloud with white and blush-pink blossoms; in summer, you enter layered green shade; and later, you see the warm colors of ripening fruit. Dappled light moves across your path as the grove guides you back toward the eastern side.

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Finally, you emerge into the two eastern courtyards, where you encounter moments of formal order within the flowing landscape. Each courtyard appears to you as a crisp geometric room shaped by clipped evergreens, their small leaves forming dense, dark green lines.

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Pyramidal evergreens anchor the corners with compact, conical forms and fine texture, while yellow flowers glow at the center like small pools of sunlight.

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As your walk comes to rest, the garden lingers within you like a quiet mandala. Trees, herbs, flowers, stone, wind, sunlight, and open sky answer one another as you move through the directions. Earth steadies your steps, sunlight glows in the blossoms, air stirs wings and grasses, and space opens between each form so that all may breathe. The paths, pockets of micro clover, sacred geometry, and waiting benches do more than join one garden room to the next—they invite your own inner landscape into balance. And as you leave, the garden’s quiet rhythm travels with you—a living pattern of earth, light, and breath unfolding long after the path has ended.