Dairy Farm Nature Park - The Quarry trail flowers.

Last Sunday, we took a walk to the quarry section of the Dairy Farm Nature Park. The weather was great for walking for the sun was behind clouds most of the time towards noon time. The tarmac road leading to the quarry was safe to walk along as traffic was blocked from entering the park.

Etlingera elatior - Torch Ginger

No matter how many times I photograph this glorious flower, there will never be a time when I find that looking at it time and again is a tiresome thing to do. The flowers are the same and yet different in the way they greet and live the day.

Torch Ginger

I never tire of looking at this flower. This one here is different from those I have seen earlier because of the red stalk. Red is one of my favourite colours because it seems to contain life's energy.

Etlingera elatoir - Torch Ginger

这朵鲜红花的吸引力其实是太强了. 我无发去抵抗.结果站在非常热的环境把花当者一位 漂亮的
模特儿. 通常别人会拍一张或两张照片.但是我和花的关系就比较特别.我也很难解释为什么我不能就拍一两张照片就觉得满足了.也许这是我的性格.想到要做就做到地.没兴趣就别开工.那天很幸运遇到那么迷人的花.可以说是迷我的花. 对我来说时间是很宝贵.但是假如我们闭者眼睛过日子我们可能会失去好多宝贵的体验和深沉的经验.

This huge torch ginger flower is far too attractive for me to resist. Usually people would stop by and take one or two photos and move on. Not me because I would stay to take numerous pictures before I am satisfied. I do not know why this is so, perhaps it is just my character to lose myself completely in whatever I do once I get started and time is forgotten for a while. I was very fortunate to have seen this beautiful flower on that extremely hot day. Time to me is precious but I feel that if we do not spend time to appreciate things around us, then we might just lose what is truly precious because of what we might have missed if we went around with our eyes closed half the time.

My writing in Chinese is sheer labour fueled by the motivation to learn in a meaningful way. Even though I make many grammatical errors, I do benefit from the exercise of finding the right words using my electronic dictionary.It is a pity I do not have a tutor anymore for she would have helped me to construct sentences that are correct in structure before I post them. My apologies for the flaws in the way I write in Chinese.

Torch GInger

In the Singapore Botanic Gardens, these ginger plants are always flowering. When the rest of the plants in the gardens are taking a rest from blooming, I can always be assured that there will be flowers here. This time, I found them rather late and the sun has almost set. Forgive the blurness in some of the pictures. Even when technical perfection is lacking, the flowers never fail to delight.

Flowers - simple to complex

When I first drew a flower as a child, the flower looked like this Kopsia flavida flower. My flowers always had 5 simple petals that are either round or oval in shape no matter how many times I drew them.

But in my child's limited view, I could not have drawn them to look like the flowers of the Ruellia brittoniana (Desert Petunia).

Like life, there is so much variety amongst flowers. Other than the shape of the petals, some flowers have distinctive features like the flower of the Strophanthus gratus(Climbing Oleander).When I first saw the flowers I thought that they must have come from some exotic land like Africa and I was right.

What I could not stop to marvel at is how the flowers of the Lagerstroemia indica (Crepe Myrtle) from Japan and China reached this level of sophistication where the flowers are many times removed from the basic form of the Kopsia flavida.

Finally, what more is there to say about the flowers of the Torch ginger - Etlingera elatior 'pink' here except that it impresses through sheer size and quantity of petals.