The Queen’s flower also called the Queen’s Crape Myrtle also has another name, Pride of India. Till date I was able to get only a distant view of this flower, the colourful inflorescence stands upright like a bright crown on top of the branches. The flowers were violet mixed with lilac colour ๐ Tree tales:…
Tag: Garden
Tree tales: An April bouquet from Bangalore๐๐ณ(April series Part ๐ of ๐ )
The lovely tabebuia waves that engulfed Bangalore in March, showering the city streets, parks and gardens with pink and yellow trumpet shaped flowers have ebbed; after the summer rains, the bare tabebuia trees are now flush with the tender green leaves. And for April, the city is adorning a new coat of colours weaved from…
POTD: Colours of the Allamanda ๐
Old woody vine, new leaves, generous buds and large flowers in an array of colours ! The woody climber had gone into hibernation during the last four months and now it’s blooming again prodded on by the summer’s heat and rain. The last time, I saw only one colour of the Allamanda๐POTD: Allamanda ๐ฎ, a…
POTD: Spectacular Arali ๐๐ธ
Today morning’s paper had a forecast on the monsoon by a private weather forecaster Skymet “Normal South-West monsoon this year” the headlines read; “But Rajasthan, Gujarat, some N-E states. Karnataka and Kerala to get scanty rains”; is this the normal !? “Fortunately, key agricultural states such as Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and rain-fed areas…
POTD: Bottlebrush ๐
The tree is covered in a canopy of small narrow green leaves radiating out from drooping branches with bright red bristle like flowers seen hanging downwards at the edges; the uncommon foliage and flora catches the eye; the flowers look like colourful tinsel tied onto the edges of the limp branches and the tree looks…
A speck of blue in the Morpankhi ๐ชด
It is a planted presence in almost every garden; we have rows of them in our apartment complex. They are eye-catching for their peculiar foliage; the pine like leaves grow in a single plane outwards giving it a fan like appearance. But it’s spring and they too are in bloom, tiny yellow flowers; the fruits…
City Hues ๐
The changing seasons bring about a kaleidoscope of colours in the sky; in Feb, the cloudy grey early mornings give way to a cover of myriad shades of blue with fluffy white cumulus clouds orchestrated to hijack our thoughts (for a moment at least), by forming vaguely familiar but mostly mysterious patterns; floating to elsewhere but…
Home is where the heart is…๐
“What is a Porpoise ?” asks my seven year old nephew. “Maybe it’s something like the tortoise; lives on land and in water !?” I make a guess and reply (I was so wrong ๐ฌ; I should have googled it!). The kid too soon realised that my answer was wrong ๐ “If they lived on…
Under the tamarind tree ๐ณ
A story in Ruskin Bond’s book the Kashmiri Storyteller goes like this… A man sees a walnut tree and a creeping gourd plant and exclaims ๐ค “Oh, Allah!” he said. “How strange are Your ways. You have given such small nuts to such a large tree, while the creeping gourd plant bears a fruit out…
Tree-spotting ๐ด
We were inside the Brookfield Ecoworld complex on the Outer Ring Road in Sarjapur, Bangalore; the palm fringed roads looked spectacular ! The tall stately looking palms were standing in perfect attention, their green canopy swaying in the wind, greeting the commuters. The trunk of this particular palm variety looked perfectly smooth and grey like…
POTD: Violet vines ๐
They are hanging over our boundary wall from the neighbour’s; thrilled to see it. The colour and the clusters look so very pretty. Violet comes to mind; on closer inspection, there is also a hint of purple. They are called Petrea, a creeper named after Robert James Petre, a renowned British botanist. The petals of…
Hedge hunting ๐ฎ
Our apartment complex in Bangalore is composed of a single tower with eight flats on each floor. And like all planned apartment gardens, we too have hedges circumambulating the outside perimeter of this fourteen storey tower. These hedges are composed of a variety of flowering plants and a few variegated shrubs but always manicured to…
Almond canopy๐๐
There’s always something that catches the eye and sparks a curiosity; for this tree, it was it’s big broad shapely red leaves. On sunny days, the tree drew attention as it filtered the sunlight through its crimson and green canopy, while on the cold windy days, the burnt orange and brown hues exuded an autumn…
Yellow splendour ๐ณ๐
No one told this tree that it was winter in Bangalore; it’s yellow flowers are in full bloom and together with the green canopy, it stands dressed in green and gold ๐ณ๐, ready for the wedding season ! It’s called Gaudichaudi or the Chestnutleaf trumpet bush; the flowers shaped like golden yellow trumpets and clustered…
An in-flight discovery
Friday morning, we check-out from the hotel by 6:30 am, a cab drives us to the Nadi airport and we are ready to bid adieu to the island paradise. We boarded Korean Air by 10:00 am, our airline from Fiji to Seoul and were off. Most people may overlook the in-flight magazine, but for me it…
Miles and smiles 
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