Garden-By-The-Bay

My cameras ran out of batteries as I left the orchid show, leaving me with just my handphone to make a snapshot inside one of the 2 chilled Flower Domes at the Garden-By-The-Bay project. It turned out quite decent, showing the giant ferris wheel and skyscrapers at the backdrop.
Out at the garden, I rubbed my eyes and looked twice to confirm that one of the super trees was indeed laden with Tillandsia xerographical. I do hope this form is more tolerant of the monsoon here ....
This is the zoom-out view of the project, evidently still a work-in-progress but there's enough stuff to visualise the fab-out product.

Water banana

Typhonodorum lindleyanum, sometimes known as a water banana, growing on a water lily pond at Singapore Botanical Garden.

Showing off ....

Showing off my Anthurium veitchii acquired as a small 15cm long plant 9 years ago. This is supposedly a cool grower but decided to settle down here in the lowland.

Lotus pond in Dresden

The Dresden Botanical Garden prides itself in having a large lotus pond within the greenhouse. The star attraction is the Victoria amazonica, the giant water lily from Amazon, which is right in the niddle of the pic. If you click to enlarge the picture, you can also see the yellow bloom of Nymphaea mexicana at the bottom left.

I think this is Nymphaea caerulea although I could not find the tag for this calmingly subtle bloom.
Nymphoides ezzannoi - a small African member of lotus family.

Artful Aristolochia

Looking up the glass ceiling of the greenhouse at Teplice Botanical Garden, I was surprised by the sight of Aristolochia gigantea flowers dangling everywhere - each bloom is larger than a human head.

These flowers look and smell like rotten meat, but they are really much smarter. On the first day of opening (anthesis), the flower is in female phase during which flies, fooled by the sight and smell, enter a chamber via a constricting entrance lined by inward pointing hairs. This is where the reproductive structure(gynostemium) sits.

And there, they are trapped, but not too long - just 1 day, which gives them sufficient time to deposit pollen collected previously from another flower onto the stigma.

The next day, the flower change sex into a male and the fly is dusted with a new pollen coat once more. Soon, the hairs lining the entrance became flaccid and the fly can leave at will to visit another female flower - and repeat the ordeal.
At Dresden Botanical Garden, I saw a less well-known member of the family - Pararistolochia promissa, much smaller in size but no less intriguing nor pungent. This is a predominantly tropical African genus (with only 1 Asian species so far) that differs from the usual Aristolochias by having fleshy, colourful fruits rather than dry brown capsules. Most likely, it rely on fruit eaters for dispersal. And like its bigger cousin, it uses the same trick to get some. This plant is still restraining its unwilling runner in its smelly jail cell.

Refreshing my succulents encounter

I do not have many succulents in my photo portfolio although I did start growing the miniature ones before everything else. The humid tropical climate here is not condusive for their growth and they tend to end up looking unnatural and dead. On top of that, to see them in their habitat would require me to break my piggy bank....and probably some other people's as well.

So while in Europe, I visited some succulent greenhouses in the botanical gardens to see how they would look if properly grown. I was immediately envious how nice and colourful even the more common Gasterias and Haworthias look over here - as I could barely recognise those same species being offerd for sale back home. There are many Aloes that are new to me, especially minatures like this A. descoingsii which I am itching to try....


....also very desirable is this relative of the pepper, Peperomia columella from Peruvian Andes - but its need need for a cool and dry environment probably means that it would not find Singapore very homely....



....and for the first time, I saw this man-size Cyphostemma juttae, a succulent from grape family which is relatively common amongst caudiciform collectors in the west but would be unlikely to do well in SE Asia.


....this is a xerophytic Madagascan version of the national flower of Malaysia, and as the label says, its called Hibiscus grandidieri.



....then, my heart missed a beat when I saw the Welwitschia mirabilis fruiting.


This plant grows in the dryest place on earth, bears just 2 creeping leaves throughout its life and has been known to live for more than a thousand years in the wild. I have seen it in documentaries and books but never in real life before....(click on pic to enlarge)

....and I learn too if you see moss covered rocks in the desert (especially in NW Argentina), you better look carefully before resting your butt on them .....


for these spiky moss wannabes from Bromeliad family, Abrometiella brevifolia to be precise, can be quite injurious to your behind.

Ember Fire

Well, I like this photo quite a bit. There was no special effect in this, what I saw and capture is what appeared here. The background yellow light came from my newly created DIY water feature and I intentionally placed the small LED light to cast a shadow of the flower on the leaf.

This Seemania sylvatica is seed grown and can spread rapidly by underground stems, forming a spectacular carpet if humidity is kept high.

The Tale of 2 Begonia brevirimosa

Begonia brevirimosa ssp "Exotica" Begonia brevirimosa ssp "Brevirimosa".

The image of the Begonia "exotica" was implanted in my memory 10 plus years ago while reading Alfred B. Graf's book "Tropica" borrowed from library. In fact, I probably borrowed the book more than ten times - it was a stress reliever and I literally hugged the heavy book to sleep. Anyway, this strange new species tentatively named Begonia "exotica" from the mysterious island of New Guinea, was so different from any Begonias I knew, psychedelically coloured leaves and all, that I set my sight to hunt it down at all cost, even to the dark depths of New Guinea ...

Luckily, I did not have to go that far. When I eventually saw it on the rack of a private collector a few years later, my heart was thumping.

I remembered he said, almost apologetically, that it would be a bit expensive as it was a rare plant

So how much ? I asked

8 dollars, he replied.

I grabbed it immediately and thanked him profusely. Nowadays, you can probably see them on sale in quite a few on-line sites but in those days it was indeed rare.

As it turned out, what I had was not exactly "exotica" but the subspecies Begonia brevirimosa brevirimosa (by the way, subspecies is a taxonomic term meaning naturally occuring variants of ths same species). In 2005, Mark Tebbitt formally described "exotica" to be a subspecies, rather than another new species, after considering the flowers and fruits characteristics. I acquired the real "exotica" only last year and finally had a chance to compare the two. Both of them are quite similar but not really the same - the dominating bright pink streaks for "exotica" really stood out.

Given some shade from full sun, warmth and high humidity, the plants thrived at my plot - but do not seem to flower freely. Unfortunately, snails and slugs cannot leave them alone and they cannot adapt to the drier balcony environment when I tried to bring them indoors.

Three tenors...sorry, four

I am not exactly singing praises but to have four Amorphophalluses blooming all at once is quite unusual in my years of growing these plants. From the top photo, the plants are A. paenifolius (top), A. albidus (left) and koratensis (right). The miniature one at the front appears to be A. obscurus.

A. albidus is supposed to be nice smelling but none was detected. Instead, the largest one, A. paenifolius was reeking - dog faeces if you need a more precise description....so the job of putting them together for this family shot had not been very pleasant ....

All these plants are from Indo-China region, which, unlike the Sumatran species, tend to be easier to grow for the climate here. Like all Amorphophalluses, each of the bulb only produce only 1 leaf during its growing cycle before going dormant again. Sometimes, this event may be preceeded by the appearance of an inflorescence, if they are amorous, but bulbs do not generally bloom every season as much energy will be expended.

Amorphophallus atroviridis

A. atroviridis is one of the more ornamental species of this group of carrion imitating aroids, – medium size, pretty in and out of bloom. As such, it is very commonly encountered in ebay and specialty nurseries and have been grown commercially in Thailand for the horticulture trade. The latin name means dark green, - a referral to the dark velvety leaf with red margins, but there is actually some degree of variation as I also has one specimen with rather plain green leaves.

The inflorescence (its actually a collection of flowers, not a single flower)is pretty conventional for Thai Amorphophallus and is characterised by the very long sterile spadix. I did not notice any smell at all, although experience tells me it is emmitted only certain times of the day - I had noticed previously that variabilis smells only at night.

To really make a confirmed identification, one needs to cut up the flower and look at the parts below - well I can't bear to do it ....or perhaps I am just too plain lazy.

Branches

A pecan plantation at Alabama. Carya illinoinensis, or Pecan is a large deciduous tree from southern part of North America which produce an edible nut that looked like an elongated rubber seed (has same pattern too). We could still find quite a bit of fresh nuts on the ground below one of the trees,which I cracked with a firm stomp and picked the meat out. Finding that the fresh meat tasted sweeter and more flavourful than those in the market, we returned to collect more .... until we were eventually chased away by the owner !

Wheels

Giant sprinklers at Cleverdon Farm, which produces 4 types of ornamental grass. The sprinkler bars are mounted on giant wheels, each wheel being almost man's height.

Huntleya wallisii

This is a tropical New world orchid related to Zygopetalums. It is a mid-size epiphyte with overlapping fan-shaped leaves designed to trap leaf debris for nourishment. This plant is not commonly grown here and to see the large waxy and gaudy bloom in Singapore is certainly a surprise. The flower last for more than 1 week and easily 2 weeks - unfortunately parent plants may weaken and die after blooming but it may send out a younger plant if it feels like it.

The Blue Family

Blue Friday. Stock market indexes drop like stone, Singapore's economy in recession and closer to home, retrenchment looms.

Head for the garden ....

While blue colouration in flowers is a relatively rare occurence in the natural world, the plant family Commelinaceae is credited with producing a good many species with varying hues and intensities of blue flowers, like the blue ginger (Dichorisandra thyrsiflora), Trandescantias and the common weed Commelina communis, which has a most intensely blue bloom.

Perhaps commercial breeders seekinng for the blue rose should take a closer look at this family. Right now, it appears they are spicing genes from pansies, and the result is not exactly blue, ha !

While visiting my friend's massive garden, I spied upon this Cochliostema jacobianum, a giant in this family of mostly smallish plants. This is an epiphyte from the New World that grows like a Bromeliad, trapping nutrients between its stacked leaves. The flowers are more purplish though, but cluster is comparatively big. The whole plant is about 3 feet in diameter and in the wild, it can be so heavy it frequently caused the branches on which it sits to snap and tumble to the forest floor. Fortunately, it seems equally adapted to terrestrial life.

Gesneriad project - Streptocarpella saxorum

8 months or so from seeds and this is what I get. Nice !
Most Streptocarpus do not do well in our climate but this relative can be grown like a succulent here.

Lydia Grace found a spot

This page from Sarah Stewart/David Small's children book "The Gardener" brings back memory of my campus days when I climbed to the rooftop of my lab building and started a succulent collection....metres away, the exhaust outlet was churning out potentially toxic fumes from the labs below. I believed that was an ideal place for the stonecrops which needed full sun, but they thought otherwise. I later learned that these are temperate plants.

Saving China's plants

Here's a story that touches me, the spirit of the guy I mean, but take out the tissue, its a weepie....

See the Worldwatch Site

There will be more to add to the casualty list where the "functionally extinct" Chinese River Dolphin is firmly anchored. The three gorges dam which will symbolise and propel China's new wealth will at the same time impoverish its ecological heritage.

Some months back I was collecting plants at a site where a dam will be built in 2010.... I hope my plants will have a happier ending....