a mess on the ground

Paula and I have several running jokes between us, but the one I’m about to describe is seasonal. It stems from an incident that Paula described to me several years ago. She’d been travelling in a minibus from the village where we live to Fanling station, and she happened to remark to a fellow passenger that the cotton trees that can be seen almost everywhere around these parts were looking particularly beautiful. The reply?

“Yes! but they leave a mess on the ground.”

Ever since, whenever we’re out walking or cycling, whoever is in front will comment, in a faux display of annoyance when we approach a cotton tree:

“Look at this bloody mess on the ground!”

Of course, we don’t really think it’s a mess. Cotton tree flowers remain colourful—and attractive—even after the tree has decided it has no further use for them. To illustrate this point, I present the following series of photographs.

Whenever we cycle out west, we start by following a narrow path from our local river to the outskirts of Sheung Shui. A couple of weeks ago, shortly before we reached Sheung Shui, we saw the following:

Actually, we’d passed this way three days earlier, and I’d stopped to take a photograph, but in the interim the accumulation of flowers in the drains on each side of the path had noticeably increased.

And this is what the same section of path looked like when viewed from the opposite direction:

Further along this path, just before it reaches the river, there is another ‘mess’:

The path to the right is a dead end.

The road that runs past our house also skirts a PLA base (Gallipoli Lines in the days of the British Army). There are several cotton trees on this base, including some that are visible from our balcony, but there are just two close to the road. This is what the ‘mess’ there looked like recently:

These two photos show the ‘mess’ created by each tree.

The road that I’ve just described eventually joins Sha Tau Kok Road, the only road that leads east from Fanling. There is a small cotton tree next to the junction, and this is the admittedly small ‘mess’ that it has created:

If we need to cross the expressway west of Fanling when cycling, we have five options. However, when heading west, we always cross via a footbridge close to the end of the Drainage Services access road that runs alongside the Sheung Yue River. Once across the footbridge, we follow a path that runs parallel to the expressway, and I took the next three photos a few days ago along this path:

You will notice that there are quite a lot of dead leaves mixed in with the flowers in the first photo, but this is, after all, the fall, the time of year when leaves fall off the trees. Most of the ‘mess’ in the third photo has been created by the cotton tree alongside the expressway, but notice that the cotton tree on the left of the path has a most unusual feature. It has a clubfoot! I’ve no idea what has caused this phenomenon.

When returning from cycling out west, we follow a dead-end road south alongside the expressway until we can cross the latter. At one point on a recent ride, I spotted yet another ‘mess’ and stopped to take a photograph. I was able to reach over the fence with my camera, and it was a case of point and hope. This was the result:

Incidentally, I’ve seen people collecting the fallen flowers on several occasions, because they have some function in Chinese herbal medicine, although precisely what that is I’m unable to say. I should also mention that cotton trees usually flower in March, but this year they’ve been a month early, which explains why I’m able to present this report in early March!

*  *  *

I compiled the above report yesterday but didn’t post it immediately. Earlier today, we were cycling around the Ping Che area, east of Fanling, when I spotted the following as we rode past:

Most of the ‘mess’ here isn’t on the ground. It’s on the tops of parked cars, and I couldn’t resist including a couple of photos. There are three cotton trees here, and the straight trunk of one of them can be seen on the left of the second photo:
further reading
Cotton Trees
A Blaze of Glory