A tree that refuses to be ordinary
Aegle marmelos grows in rocky, dry soil where most trees give up. Its thorns are long and serious. Its fruit takes a year to ripen. The bilva tree does not perform abundance, it withholds, and then delivers something dense and medicinal when it finally does. That quality of deliberate restraint is probably why the tree ended up in Shaiva cosmology rather than in a kitchen garden, though it belongs in both.
