autumn flowers #2

After posting Autumn Flowers last month, I’ve continued to photograph flowers whenever I’ve come across them, and here is a collection of these recent photos. As with my earlier post, I can’t provide identification of most of these examples.

The flowers in the first photo look like the kind that people would like in their gardens, although as far as I know they’re wild:

The next photo is of the only example of this flower that I’ve seen anywhere:

I have no hesitation in labelling the plant in the next photo a ‘weed’. It is by far the most common around these parts:

The petals of these flowers wither and drop off very quickly, so it is difficult to take good close-up photos, but here are a couple of the best I’ve managed to date:

The first photo also features some tiny, blue, orchid-like flowers, which are only 5–6mm across.

And to emphasize this plant’s weed-like qualities, I took the following photo this morning on a path between our village and the main road. This is what happens if you don’t continually clear paths of vegetation:

Morning glory is an extremely common vine hereabouts, with attractive mauve flowers:

However, it does spread quickly if given the chance. I took the following photo yesterday in the San Tin area. Paula spotted the display through the trees to one side, and we spent several minutes looking for a way to get close enough to take a photo:

The next photo is of a common ground creeper with attractive yellow flowers. I took a cutting a couple of years ago, which I was able to propagate when I returned to Penrith. Unfortunately, once I’d transplanted it to my garden, it was eaten by bloody slugs! I’ll probably try again sometime:

The next photo also appears to be of some kind of vine, although this one is much less common:

There is an area in our neighbourhood that I’ve labelled ‘the swamp’, because it is permanently waterlogged. It may once have been rice paddy, but rice hasn’t been grown in Hong Kong for decades. Nowadays, you can see a lot of ginger flowers here, and this is a typical scene:

I couldn’t get a close-up of the flowers without getting my feet wet, but this is one that I took in a different location:

Ginger is an important condiment in Cantonese cuisine, and I often see people in the swamp getting their feet wet to dig up the ginger roots.

Paula and I have a running ‘argument’ about the colour of the flowers in the next photo. I think they’re blue, while Paula thinks they’re purple. I should point out that my camera over-exposes light-coloured objects against a darker background, and the flowers are actually much darker in colour:

And they’re blue!

The next photo is of what appears to be some kind of pea or bean plant. It has been planted by farmers alongside the footpath that connects our village and Fanling:

I actually know the scientific name of the plant in the next photo. It’s Mimosa pudica, known colloquially as ‘shy plant’. The reason for this is simple: if you stroke the edges of the leaves, they fold up, and if you strike them sharply, the entire stem collapses:

The final photo in this collection is a close-up of the flowers of a paper-bark tree. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be able to take such a photo, but I took this one from a footbridge across the only road that leads east from Fanling:

I already have enough photos for a third collection of autumn flowers, which I’ll be posting later this week.

more autumn flowers
Autumn Flowers
Autumn Flowers #3
Autumn Flowers #4