National Orchid Garden

The National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens is a pretty little garden with lots of different kinds of orchids.

I love the bright cheery colours of the orchids, especially the purple ones.

I'd let the pictures do the talking for this post.

Enjoy!

I love the bright purple coloured orchids

Shopping for Flowers

 

 

I love shopping.. for all kinds of things but shopping for flowers is different from shopping for other things. You are, after all, buying home something that has a life of its own. And so you will have to like how it looks.. and think about whether you are able to take good care of it.

World Farm is my favourite place for buying flowers.

I really enjoyed looking at all the beautiful plants they have at World Farm. For some reason, they grow them very well - the hibiscus, for example, have large beautiful leaves with HUGE flowers. Ms Flamenco used to be one of those beautiful hibiscus plant.. In my balcony now though, she is skinny, with smaller leaves and smaller flowers.

I haven't had too much time lately for gardening, so I decided to bring home just a few new plants.

A mini orchid my sister-in-law brought home. 

I like it so much!

A Little Blue Surprise

I haven't been tending to my plants too much recently.

Some of them are doing pretty well.. some not so well.

It's just been too hot to stay long outside these days. That's my excuse anyway.

So it was lovely to get a little surprise in my balcony today. I have this plant in a pot I don't remember much about - the plant flowered today and the flowers are a lovely blue!

 The blue surprise in my balcony

Ciders are best for hot days like today! The Cider Pit 
(382 Joo Chiat Road) is a good place for ciders and artisan beers
This pear cider is very nice!

The Singapore Botanic Gardens

During my block leave last week, I went to the Botanical Gardens to have lunch with some friends at the Halia Restaurant (Halia is Malay word for Ginger).

I haven't been to the botanical gardens for many years, so I decided to visit it again one evening for a stroll with The Husband.

The Singapore Botanical Gardens is a really nice garden to visit... but it is really too hot to take a stroll in the gardens at any time other than early morning or evening.

Come along for a stroll with me here, in the comfort of your home.. or wherever it is you are reading this from.

The garden is really rather big - we only covered a part of it that day

Swan Lake - a couple of swans and lots of turtles. Should have been called Turtle Lake

The famous 5 dollar tree. This tree appears on the Singapore 5 dollar note. 

I really like the long branch of this tree

The Singapore flower - Vanda Ms Joaqium

These flowers are grown in an area built like a little maze. 

It's really quite pretty!

The sky was beautiful that day

I like the fiery shade of this flower

Last picture I took before heading off to dinner. I'd be back soon again!

The Growing Lemon Myrtle

The lemon myrtle plant N brought all the way for me from Brisbane died when my parents didn't manage to water my plants for 2 weeks because of the Lost Key Incident.

For a while, I didn't dare to mention it to N. But I think I briefly brought it up when we met up during one of his trips back last year. I don't remember if I mentioned it to him.. but I found a nursery in Singapore that sold this plant afterwards and bought one back home.

This lemon myrtle has been with me for about 10 months now.

It was a little thing when I brought it home. It's now much bigger than it was!

Lemon Myrtle grow pretty well it Singapore's climate - Mine gets the afternoon sun and I have found that it can survive a day or two without water pretty well. I feed it occasionally with bonemeal and seaweed extract and so far (fingers crossed), all is good.

When I have a real garden, I'd like to grow a lemon tree. That would be a really useful tree to have, I think - you can do so many things with the lemon! It seems that it can be grown in Singapore too because I saw a few on sale at World Farm.

It would be really useful to have your own lemon tree

Lots of Red

I haven't been growing many new plants in my balcony lately - just happy keeping those I already have growing and happy.

The past few weeks of sunny weather has been good for my flowering plants! I stepped out into my balcony this morning and was rewarded with lots of red and pink.

The 2 hibiscus weren't doing really well a few weeks - Ms Flamenco hadn't been flowering much and the other red hibiscus was infested with aphids. But a good dose of bonemeal plus a couple of sessions of washing for the red hibiscus fixed the problems. (I'd post about what I mean by "washing" in a separate post)

I especially like the colours of the periwinle - dark red with a spot of white and yellow in the centre. The flowers look so much like fancy butterflies!

Four O'Clock Flower

Thanks to Ting, I know now that my plant is the Four O'Clock plant.

It is also called Mirabilis, or Marvel of Peru, or "Purple Jasmine". The plant is called Four O’clock because it tends to flower in the late afternoon. It is not actually the time of day that causes the flowers to open, but the drop in temperature. And so the flowers are still open in the early morning before I go to work.

The flowers are extremely fragrant - I suspect that might be the reason why it is called "Purple Jasmine".. And they attract nocturnal pollinators like moths!

The flowers are used in food colouring. And the leaves can apparently be used to reduce inflammation.

The seeds however, are extremely poisonous, leading one website to call it the "fatally fragrant flower"

Such an interesting plant!

Photo from here

Pink Moonflowers?

Now, this plant of mine grew from a seed.. As my seed management skills obviously has great rooms for improvements, I didn't know what plant this is.

Now my plant has flowered. The flowers are a bright fuschia pink. And they have a really nice smell... not unlike a perfume I once had. The perfume had a distinctly sweet flora smell.. like jasmine but gentler and sweeter. Now these flowers smell a bit like that perfume, which supposedly had moonflower fragrance.

So now I am a little confused.. I always thought moonflowers were white!

Hm.. does anyone know what is this plant and how I should take care of it?

Taipei Flower Expo - Trivia

Some interesting trivia about the Flower Expo:

Trivia #1
The expo revolves around 3 main concepts related to gardening.. so it is more than just "flowers".. I suppose Gardening Expo doesn't sound as nice..

Concept I: Convey the essence of gardening, science and environment protection technology
Concept II: Reach the goals of reduce, reuse and recycle
Concept III: Combine culture and art as parts of eco-friendly living

Trivia #2
The flowers at the expo are not the same throughout the entire period. Flowers for display are selected based on the seasons or appropriateness. For example, when I was there around Christmas, there were a lot of Poinsetias that my friend didn't see the week before.

It is said that that the flowers are replaced as frequently as every 3 days.. Now that, is very frequent! It also means that you'd have a slightly different experience each time you go to the expo!

If you are booking tickets to Taiwan for the expo, check out this link for the various flower themes that will be on display. You'd also want to check out this 3D film for an intro to the exposition area.

Trivia #3
It is said that to finish all the exhibits "properly", you will need about 3 days. The reason being the queues for the exhibits can be pretty long.

For some exhibits, you'd actually need to draw for tickets.. so if you are really unlucky on busy days... 3 days may not be sufficient!

Trivia #4
Just some statistics on the numbers at the 91+ hectares site - 14 pavilions and more than 800 varieties of orchids, 329 million stems of locally developed plant varieties, and award-winning landscape and gardening designs from 22 countries and 26 cities.

I wonder how many visitors visit the expo on a daily basis... because.. there were lots of people when I was there on a Tuesday!

Taipei Flower Expo - Apart from flowers

There were various exhibition halls at the Taipei Flower Expo. Apart from the fields of flowers and outdoor exhibits, there were lots of interesting things to see in each of the exhibition halls.

Most had long queues outside though, even though we arrived early that day. But we still managed to go into a couple of exhibition halls.

Here are some of the photos I took of everything other than flowers at the expo.

I found the outdoor exhibits of the various countries pretty interesting.. Most display the characteristics of the countries.

This is is a fun one of Belgium..

Of great disappointment is the one from Singapore - 3 big laterns and some iron-like structures.. Where is Merlion?

Taipei Flower Expo - Flowers and then more flowers

The Taipei Flower Expo is held in Taipei from 6 Nov 2010 to 25 April 2011. We were really fortunate to be able to be in Taipei for this because it was really a pretty sight.

I'd just let the pictures do most of the talking..

There were a lot of flowers..

Some were rather strange looking.. but nonetheless beautiful..

There were just lots of flowers everywhere..

There were "fields" of flowers.. "walls" of flowers.. and flowers everywhere..

And lots of people too, if you can see from this picture below.

Actually, the flowers were much better looking in real life. Somehow, my photos do not do all those flowers justice.