another fine mess on the ground

‘A mess on the ground’ has been a running joke between Paula and me for several years now. It has developed from a conversation that Paula had with a fellow passenger while travelling to Fanling station from our village. She happened to remark that the cotton trees (Bombax ceiba) were looking particularly beautiful that year. The reply?

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

There aren’t any cotton trees in our village, but there is a line of bauhinia (Bauhinia variegata) trees, which produce Hong Kong’s ‘national’ flower:

The red in the top right of this photo is produced by bottle-brush flowers.

I took the photo more than a month ago, and for the past week the flower petals have been falling to the ground more and more frequently. In the past, I’ve often thought how nice it would be to see this pink debris accumulate. Unfortunately, however, this never happens, because one of the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department’s employees based in our village sweeps everything up first thing every morning before carrying out her other duties. She probably thinks it’s a mess anyway.

However, yesterday was different. We’ve just endured two days of constant rain, the first for two months and the result of being hit by the outer rain bands of the remnants of Super Typhoon Rai, which had ravaged the southern Philippines a few days ago. The constant rainfall accelerated the fall of flower petals, and I don’t think any of what had accumulated on the ground had been swept up while it was still raining.

We were on the minibus from Fanling station to Siu Hang, a village on the other side of the Ng Tung River, when I looked out of the window and saw the result. We were due to alight about 25 metres further along the road, and when we’d done so, I said that I simply had to go back and take some photos:

This is a close-up of the area of interest in the previous photo:

I walked around the trees in an anticlockwise direction, stopping to take photos at key points:

The previous two photos are of a separate line of trees on the other side of the entrance to the car park.

You may have noticed bars of sunlight in some of the photos. It was quite late in the day, and when we got home, I decided to go up onto our roof and take some photos of the sunset:

Not especially noteworthy, you’re probably thinking, but this is a view looking northeast! I particularly like the orange cloud blanketing the mountain ridge in the distance, which is in mainland China.

These are the first and last photos that I took looking west:

Thanks to the ubiquitous air pollution here, sunsets like this are not common, but they are nowhere near as rare as the kind of mess on the ground that I documented above.