What Social Distancing .... ?

Caterpillars of Painted Jezebels sharing the leaf of parasitic mistletoe Dendrophthoe sp. Ths host tree (Wrightia religiosia) is completely untouched.

Let the feelings flow
For love, when its real, is rare and beautiful

Honey, I want you to be part of me ......

To his horror, she was honouring her wedding vow ....

Inside looking out

For once I was glad I was inside looking out. Especially when "in" was an air-con cabin in a 4x4 and "out" was 40 DegC solar bombardment.

For these Thai monks collecting alms, it was a long way to the next village.... monk hood is not for slouches.

The apparatus that looks like a large coney dog on a stick actually opens up as a mosquito net called "klot" - which suggest that these monks will be sleeping in the wild and which also means they are likely Thudong or forest monks.  These are wondering monks that do not stay put within a monastry and instead lead a nomadic lifestyle - meditating in the wild and blessing villages they visit along the way. 

Lunch breaker

Its sweet to taste the fruit of thy labour

But sweeter still to beggar thy neighbour.

careful....you can loose your bananas

Long tailed macaque raiding some farmer's jackfruit 

being free

I think....one can only be free if he believes he has nothing to lose .....

I am a weevil in love .....

 

.....

And I do anything

To get you into my world
And hold you within
Its a right I defend
Over and over again
What do I do?

Barbara Streisand 

..... no wait.....

Waiting waiting ....

Dole-eyed follower of William and Kate

Always looking so far,
when something good is so near

How I wish she'll kiss me quick

Before I turn back to….

 

.... oops too late....

What have you been doing ....

So, what have you been doing for the past year ?

Were you just minding your own front yard....

trying to blend in, hoping not to be seen....

Or were you all out to make a scene ?

Did you take your ticket and outgrew the rest....

  

Or dried up and cracked under duress ?

 

Morphed to fly through the skies unlimited....

 

 

Or grounded with the load inherited ?

What have you been doing for the past year ?

And what would you wish to do thereafter ?

Are you flying or falling ?

I am not here
You don't see me
I am nothing
.... and nothing's perfect !

The local flying lizard (Draco volans) uncharacteristically landing on the ground.

I just want to do something big ....

"....hey, you sure you don't want to have a go at those crickets ? They're quite tasty ...."

"Oh shut up !" ........


White Collared Kingfisher

Ugly / Smelly Plants - Berry Go Round April 2013 Edition

For this roundup of Berry-Go-Round, we cast our spot-light on a shadowy corner of botanical curios that challenge our olfactory and aesthetic senses (and oftentimes, both) and test the limit of our love of plants.

Amorphophallus prainii

Skunk Cabbage

After many months of snowy winter in the Northern hemisphere, one of the first Spring blooms Tracey encountered in the swamps was non other than the dark and brooding skunk cabbage. Aaahh .... the smell of Spring. Over at the Pacific Coast Dana caught sight of its more cheerful but equally  odoriferous cousin. One thing about the Aroid family is that there's no shortage of smelly ugly plants, and the biggest of them all is a 2 metre tall foul spouting chimney -  Amorphophallus titanum - go see for yourself. Right over at Carnosa, Boon Leng has some collections of Amorphophalluses in the wild - A. prainii is a particularly stinky one. I have been a fan of these aroids for a while and sometime back, 4 species rewarded me with blooms all at once. Admittedly, no mother will say her child is ugly, likewise a gardener, his plants. But has your child ever mimic a corpse with a hairy tail ? Well, Real Monstrosities featured a dead horse arum that smelled like one too. 

Welwitschia

Out in the desert, Fireflyforest had a all-too-close encounter with the aptly named stink gourd and came back wishing they had bought deodorant. More ungainly than ugly, I cannot stop grinning at this unorthodox Saguaro specimen. At the other side of the world, somewhere in Nambib Desert to be precise, Tarmo RTW has wonderful pictures of the ancient Welwitschia mirabilis that sometimes had one wondering if its still alive - or had been alive. At the garden of PATSP, another xerophyte, Stapelia gigantea, unleashed its bristly bloom that smelled of dog faeces ....

Underground Orchid

Vines....how bad can they get ? Well I can assure you Aristolochia gigantea is a real shocker and its smaller cousin Pararistolochia promissa reeks of really bad seafood. Orchids too ? Yes - in fact this family is so diverse that its unsurprising some of them can be unconventional due to their extreme adaptations. Take the Bulbophyllums for example, this is a genus of many carrion-fly pollinated flowers and so they have to smell and look like the flies favourite haunt - rotting fruits or carcasses. Zul's Orchid craze featured one of these -  Bulbophyllum graveolens, and PBG Blog showcased the giant Bulbophyllum beccarii from Borneo- from the smell, you would have thought somebody had died there. And what about the totally weird looking saprophytic orchid Galeola , with its sausage-like pods and the fantastic underground orchid - Rhizanthella gardneri ? Yes, I just said an underground orchid, though I am as baffled as you especially after looking at the closeups. 

And finally, let's look at some parasitic plants - this is where the experiments run wild on stolen rations. First off, Hydnora - from Real Monstrosities excellent photos I thought I was staring at an alien rupture. And from Jungle Mike's incredible adventures, the bizarre Rafflesia and its hair-raisingly ugly cousin Rhizanthes lowii. 

Well, that sums it up for now - I fear some readers may have reached their threshold for smelly ugly things. 

Berry-Go-Round is a blog carnival of botanical things and they welcome contributors and hosts alike - do check it out. 

Cheers.

Anger management

Hybrid Betta

" Its ok to lose it sometimes, part of being alive ..... but knowing when to stop can actually keep you alive."  said one small fish to another

Boo !

 

A Mongolian Tsam mask. 

Happy Halloween ....

Crimson blood

..... every drip sends you further away from me.

Reach for the sky

A rain tree just outside the ground of my old primary school, which no longer exist. An unglamorous school in a forgotten corner perhaps, but it had lifted us closer to the light.

Dichotomy

Blind date

Its no good, she thought .....this blind date thingy. She had been hurt before ..... as soon as they see her they left the table without even ordering beverages.
She dragged her limbs to the meeting place but lacked the courage to proceed.... until, at the corner of her eyes, she caught sight of him.....

He was persistent....as a matter of fact he was relentless. And she relented...... ....and she felt she found love, at last.
Romance of thorny stick insects of unknown genus in highland forests of Pahang, Peninsula Malaysia.

Post Note : Epidares sp. (nolimetangere ?)

A fallowed ground

.... time to send off another year of the usual economic crisis, natural disasters and East Asian assets bubble, sprinkled with a little nuclear scare. Some may point out bits of notable bright sparks, namely - the obliteration of some seriously undesirable characters, crumbling of tyrannical regimes, scientific break-throughs and revitilisation of Liverpool Football Club.

Anyway, it had not been my most productive period and I am glad to see the back of it. Now, if I can only find the "Reset" button ....

Winter in highland terraced rice field of Lao Cai, Northern Vietnam, where duration of rice growing season is roughly half of that in the lowland due to the cold climate.

Looking out....

.... it is a bigger world out there. Perhaps its time to leave the comfort zone .....