Lara's Singapore Blog » Plants

Bali: Some Plants

Lara — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:16:40 +0000

This post is mainly for Daxin, unless there’s another botanically-inclined reader out there. Here are two interesting plants we saw in Bali. The first is in a pot in the Tirta Gangga (Water Palace) near Amlapura:

Below is a closeup- or at least as close as I could get in the conditions:

It looks like a hybrid of a begonia and a cactus – who can identify it?

Meanwhile, below is a flower that grows in tangles on rural roadsides by the sea:

I happen to know the name of this one, because it appears in local cookbooks. An extract is made of its flowers that’s used to dye rice blue, if you want that effect in a dessert. The name in the recipes is clitoridia.

Orange blob tree

Lara — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 01:44:00 +0000

This is in the Yunnan Garden. Can you identify it? I can’t.

Big Fungus

Lara — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 01:42:39 +0000

Textured Tree Bark

Lara — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:43:41 +0000

Peacock Flower, Caesalpinia pulcherrima, Pride of Barbados

Lara — Fri, 14 May 2010 01:26:51 +0000

These are growing outside one of the Technopreneuship Building. Or is it the Innovation in Technology Building? Or the Research Center for Technology and Entrepreneurship? Anyway, some fancy new building with a highfalutin buzzword name. The flowers are lovely, though; two colors follow:

YOG: Philistine Fencing Fuglier

Lara — Fri, 14 May 2010 01:12:57 +0000

They’re adding the barbed wire to the top of the new fence, just as I feared. At least it’s not razor wire. But it adds even more obstruction to the cooling, refreshing jungle view we used to have:

To see how this affects your view of interesting plants closer to the sidewalk, behold:

But there have been complaints, and they’ve been heard. You can see here the attempt to make the bus stop feel less like a jail with the judicious use of plants:

I am purely disgusted.

Yunnan Garden at Nanyang Technological University

Lara — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:33:04 +0000

This morning I had a little extra time to walk through the garden and take some pictures. They’re not an exhaustive show of all the kinds of plants in the garden, but might give you an idea of what Chinese gardening aesthetics can do with a lot of space and a tropical rainforest climate.

Here’s one of the five or six pavilions in the garden.

Here’s that same pavilion from a different standpoint, framed by a tree with really interesting lichen.

Below, something very rare in Singapore: a stretch of unpaved smooth lawn. It has benches and lanterns along the walkway. Nobody’s sitting on the benches. In fact, hardly anyone uses this park, after the commuters have come through it to the university and the Tai Chi exercisers have gone home.

Time for another pavilion picture:

Now a little brick pathway, complete with umbrella palms. When the rain hits these they make a really loud spattering noise:

And finally, no Chinese garden is complete without wierd rocks in it. These surround a cenotaph that celebrates various dignitaries’ presence at a 1958 celebration to mark “the completion of the first phase of construction of Nanyang University.” They mean Nantah University – see my previous post on taxi driver history.

Epiphytes on Campus

Lara — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:55:39 +0000

Epiphytes are plants that grow on trees; I don’t think they’re parasites, but they use the bark to gain a foothold and nutrients. The older trees at the NTU campus have really great collections of epiphytes on them. First, a tree with a nice birds’ nest fern in it:

And then the next tree in line, with quite a variety of epiphytes:

Frangipani/Plumeria/Ylang-Ylang II

Lara — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:46:42 +0000

These blossoms just happened to land on the grass a few minutes before I passed on my walk this morning.

Frangipani, Plumeria and Ylang-Ylang

Lara — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:38:45 +0000

They’re all the same plant. They bloom all year in Singapore, and drop blossoms on the sidewalk constantly. If the spent blooms are swept up by 7:30 there are a few more on the ground by 7:45. I gathered a sample of newly-fallen flowers this morning so you could have a look at some of the varieties. They smell nice, too, ranging from a vanilla-related scent to one with lemony tones.