neighbourhood trees: the top ten

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been photographing many of the trees in my immediate neighbourhood. Some of our local trees are quite impressive, and it’s often impossible to get far enough away to capture the entire tree in a single shot. I haven’t attempted to rank these arboreal behemoths in any kind of order, but what follows is my assessment of the top ten.

If you come into the area from Fanling’s industrial district via Lok Tung Street, you will notice a path to the left immediately after crossing the Ma Wat River. There is a large banyan a short distance down this path:

The large leaves nearest the camera are not part of this tree.

And this is a closer view from the same direction:

Continuing along this road, now without a name after crossing the river, this is what you will see shortly before reaching the entrance to Ma Wat Wai (wai is Cantonese for ‘walled enclosure’):

The road continues into the darkness on the left, and this is the view from the other side:

This is also a banyan, and it has many more aerial roots than my first example.

This is a close-up view of the tree from the side opposite the road, showing the profusion of aerial roots:

Shortly after passing Ma Wat Wai, there is a T-junction. Turning right here leads first to Lo Wai and then to the Tang Chung Ling Ancestral Hall. Opposite the entrance tower of Lo Wai is this cinnamomum:

Part of the enclosing wall of Lo Wai can be seen in the bottom left of this photo.

Like many cinnamomum trees, this one leans heavily to one side and has been propped up, as you can see in this photo, taken looking back from the ancestral hall:

More of the walls of Lo Wai can be seen in this photo.

Continuing past the ancestral hall, the road eventually comes to an end next to Tung Kok Wai. There is a small park here, with another banyan in one corner:

You can see the gatehouse of this wai through a gap in the buildings on the right. You may also notice the hessian sacking around the trunk of the tree. This is an indication that the tree is afflicted by brown root rot, which is caused by a fungus (Phellinus noxius) and can prove fatal for the tree because it inhibits the tree’s ability to suck up water. The sacking has been impregnated with a suitable fungicide. I hope it works.

This is what the tree looks like from the opposite side:

Returning to the T-junction that I mentioned above and turning left instead of right, there is a short dead-end road on the right that leads to a short path. The next tree, which you can see along this path, does look pretty impressive, but it isn’t possible to photograph the entire tree because it’s surrounded by industrial panelling—the only quasi-industrial site in the entire neighbourhood:

This is a closer view:

The path leads eventually to the Wing Ning Wai Sitting-Out Area, where I often sit in quiet contemplation. There is another cinnamomum leaning at a crazy angle here:

This one hasn’t been propped, although it does appear that a couple of large branches were sawn off at some point in the distant past. This is a view from further inside the park:

Behind the camera position for the previous photo is another imposing tree, just outside the park:

The road that we turned off to see the previous three trees continues, eventually reaching the Ma Wat River. Some time after photographing these trees, I was walking along this road when I spotted an obvious candidate for inclusion in my top ten:

This is the view from a position to the left of the previous photo:

Hmm! I thought, another tree with a ladder propped against the trunk. However, a short while later, I was sitting in the park once again when it dawned on me: they’re the same tree!

And that’s a comprehensive survey of my favourite trees south of Sha Tau Kok Road, a major highway and the only road out of Fanling to the east. The next tree in this collection, another banyan, is located alongside the path that we used to follow whenever we walked into Fanling from the village where we live. Thanks to the Fanling North New Development Area, this path no longer exists, apart from the short section before it crosses the Ma Wat River. This shot was taken looking back towards the village:

There is a banyan on Sha Tau Kok Road next to the main entrance to San Wai Barracks, one of several bases now occupied by the People’s Liberation Army. This is a view from the east, looking across the roundabout that marks the junction with the road leading to the newly built Queen’s Hill Estate, which has blighted the view from our balcony:

This is a closer view:

The sign on the wall next to the tree reads ‘Gallipoli Lines’, which is what this base was called in British times.

Finally, there is an obvious path that starts next to Tung Kok Wai and leads across what we refer to as ‘the swamp’, a large waterlogged area that may once have been cultivated. This path leads eventually to Po Kak Tsai. Whenever we come this way, we don’t follow the road here. Instead, we follow a path that runs above the road, and just before the path rejoins the road, there is a large banyan:

The nature of the terrain here makes it impractical to take photos from other angles.

And that’s my top ten trees in our immediate neighbourhood, most if not all of which will have been deliberately planted to enhance the fung shui of the area. However, there are also a few rubber trees in the neighbourhood, and although none are as impressive as the trees I’ve included here, whenever I see one, I’m reminded of all the people back home in the UK who keep rubber plants in pots in their living rooms. This is how big these could get if given the chance:

Technically, this tree isn’t in our immediate neighbourhood. It’s about 4km northeast of our village, but it’s the largest rubber tree I’ve ever seen, and it’s within walking distance, so I’ve chosen to include it here.

Also in the same general area, in the village of Sheung Shan Kai Wat, is this banyan, which is the equal of any of the other trees in this collection but doesn’t qualify as ‘in the neighbourhood’:

But I like it.

which options reliably determine lexical expertise?

I’ve always enjoyed solving word puzzles, although until recently the majority of such puzzles that I came across, particularly in newspapers, were annoyingly easy. This is the reason I started to devise my own puzzles in the early 1990s. I created several repeatable formats, examples of which I posted on this blog when I started in 2009 (Wedgewords; Chainwords; Scramble Six), which provided the challenge that I thought was missing from the word puzzles of the day.

This all changed last year, when a friend on Facebook started posting comments about Wordle. Some of his comments were complaints (“they’re using American spelling”), while some were boasts (solving a given puzzle in just two attempts—see below). I was intrigued and decided to check out Wordle for myself. If I were to describe it in a single word, I would say that it is ‘ingenious’.

The object of the game is to guess an unknown five-letter word, and you are allowed six attempts. After each attempt, letters that are in their correct position in the mystery word are highlighted in green, while letters that are contained in the word, but are in the wrong position, are highlighted in yellow. Letters that are not in the word remain black. This is how the system works in a game in which I needed all six guesses:

This is a good example of a poor second guess, which I was lucky to get away with. I should have tried RAISE, which would still have left me with a lot to do, but at least I would have had all the vowels in their correct positions much earlier. You will notice that I started with AUDIO, which contains four of the five vowels, although I’ve been led to believe that this is not the optimum strategy. According to researchers from MIT, the best starting word is SALET, a word that you probably haven’t even heard of (it’s a mediæval military helmet). When I first read this, I couldn’t help but wonder why LEAST, SLATE, STALE and STEAL aren’t equally as good, but apparently SALET has the consonants in their most common positions.

Anyway, I shall continue with AUDIO, at least for the time being. And I also now have standard choices for my second guess. If the only positive result from my first guess is a yellow A:

…a yellow I:

…or a yellow O:

And so on.

If I have no positive results from my first guess, then this is my second guess:

This last example highlights a recurring problem in Wordle: letter combinations that still offer many possibilities.

This is another example of a game where I just succeeded with my final attempt, even though I had three greens from my second guess:

There are much worse possibilities than this. For example, there are nine possible words ending in –IGHT, eight possibilities ending in –OUND, and seven possibilities ending in –ATCH. One of the four games I’ve lost since I started playing Wordle involved the word FOUND. At the time, I felt that it was unfair to include such words in the list of possible solutions, but I’ve since worked out a strategy for dealing with this particular problem.

Obviously, the chance that I can guess the word at my first attempt is zero—unless I switch to a strategy that involves selecting a different first word each time—but even to succeed in two guesses involves a great deal of luck. Here are three examples:

I should point out that the ‘official’ Wordle, owned by the New York Times, offers just one game each day—this is the one I play. It’s also worth noting that there are two lists associated with the official version: a list of possible solutions (determined in advance), and a list of valid guesses. As I understand it, the list of possible solutions excludes plurals ending in s and the past tense of verbs ending in –ed (e.g., added, rated). There was a controversy recently on the Reddit subforum devoted to Wordle over the word of the day: RIPER. The objection was that comparative adjectives should also be excluded from the official solutions list. Incidentally, this word broke my longest winning streak to date (106).

Anyway, that’s Wordle. If you’ve never played it but would like to try, simply google ‘Wordle’ and choose the game offered by the New York Times—there are quite a few clones, some of which offer unlimited play, and there are also sites that offer Wordle-like games with longer words. I tried some of these, but the five-letter version is the most interesting.

a grand day out #3

Until the weekend before last, I hadn’t done any cycling since November following a freak accident in which I sustained a hairline fracture of a bone in my wrist. Paula had also forgone cycling during this period, so, naturally, we didn't want to do anything too ambitious after such an extended lay-off. We settled for a ride out west as far as the western end of San Tin Tsuen Road. In other words, a straightforward out-and-back ride in which we clocked 42km.

During the week, I went out by myself to the same turnaround point, and by including a few detours on the way back, including ‘on the money’, ‘oriental garden’ and ‘farmland fandango’, I was able to notch up 51km.

On Saturday, we wanted to go further west, but there was just one small problem. At the end of San Tin Tsuen Road, it’s necessary to cross Castle Peak Road, which carries a lot of traffic, and bump up the kerb on the far side of the road to join the Sheung Shui to Yuen Long cycle track, and my wrist was still rather sore. I did think about pushing my bike across the road, but in the event I made the crossing in the usual way—and didn’t feel any discomfort.

We always stop at a so-called ‘rest station’ shortly after joining the cycle track, and while there I happened to notice some flowers of a kind that I didn’t think I’d seen before, so naturally I took a photo:

It’s just a sapling at the moment, but if it becomes a fully fledged tree, I think that it will look pretty spectacular.

Just before the cycle track crosses San Tam Road, I couldn’t help but notice a strange graffito on the abutment of the bridge carrying the expressway across the road:

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was a foretaste of what we were to discover in the Yuen Long area.

Incidentally, this is where we depart from the cycle track, the next section of which is very disjointed. Nowadays, we follow San Tam Road as far as the entrance to the Tam Mei valley. This road does carry some high-speed traffic, but it’s wide enough that any overtaking vehicles can give a cyclist plenty of room.

I did notice some graffiti as we crossed the Kam Tin River via the Hung Mo Bridge, but we didn’t stop. However, we did stop at the exit from a tunnel under the expressway at the start of ‘the hospital path’ so that I could take this photo:

The hospital path exits onto the main cycle track, which we followed eastwards to the point where it’s possible to turn right (the main cycle track goes straight on). And after passing under Castle Peak Road, there is a three-way junction in the cycle tracks here.

This is a view of the exit we were about to follow:

…and this graffito is on the left-hand side of the exit to the right:

I could see more graffiti through the tunnel:

…so I wanted to take a closer look:

This is a selection of the graffiti on the walls on both sides here:

The next photo shows the only graffiti in this area that is reminiscent of a style that I’ve seen in Fanling (see Scrawl on the Wall):

I’ve included the next photo to show the cycle track here. We would have come down this hill after a ride around the area known as Shap Pat Heung (‘eighteen villages’), which includes some of the most exciting paths in the Yuen Long area, but in the interests of rehabilitation, we had planned to restrict the ride to a basic out-and-back journey until we had built up our fitness after such a long lay-off:

And so we continued. But there was more graffiti on the far side of the underpass:

This is a closer look at the graffiti on the left:

…and on the right:

Incidentally, we don’t follow the cycle track here, although we could to reach our next stopping point, a convenient bus shelter in the village of Shui Mei. We head off to the right. There is neither pavement nor cycle track here, but there is a convenient gap behind the crash barrier alongside the main road, which we follow for about 100 metres before reaching another cycle track. Just before it crosses Hung Mo Bridge, there is a flight of steps down which we can bump our bikes to reach Ko Po Road, which runs alongside the river. We often see dozens of wildlife photographers here—I’ve shot some interesting videos here—but on this occasion there were none, because the tide was too high, so there were no birds to be seen.

There is a really strange cotton tree (Bombax ceiba) behind the bus shelter in Shui Mei. These trees usually have trunks that are dead straight, like conifers (A Blaze of Glory), but this one is grossly misshapen:

I took several photos of the tree from different angles. This one taken from the bridge across the stream to the left suggests that the main trunk was cut at some point in the past, which encouraged random growth in all directions:

This view is from the right:

And so is this:

The ‘mess on the ground’ is developing rather nicely!

Under normal circumstances, we would do ‘the original path’ and the five ‘outer limits’ paths before heading home, but we didn’t want to overdo things, so from this point we set off on our homeward journey. However, there are two large ponds at the north end of Shui Mei, and as we reached the first one, we could see an impressive display of bougainvillea on the far side across the water. I often photograph this plant, and we’d already seen quite a few examples that we didn’t stop for, but we simply had to get photos of this display. This is the view from the left-hand end, where the road we would be following next crosses a small stream:

This view shows more of the display to the right:

…and further right still:

…while this is a view looking back to the left:

Notice that the stream is completely choked with water hyacinths, although on this occasion there were no flowers—I will be checking this out on future rides.

I took this final photo as much to illustrate how completely the water hyacinths have choked the stream as to show the bougainvillea:

There are also a few morning glory flowers at the bottom of the photo.

Although I didn’t take a photo across the ponds when we first saw the bougainvillea, I did take a photo looking back, which I’ve included because I think it’s quite scenic:

After this stop, we headed back home by the shortest route, apart from a detour through ‘oriental garden’, followed by a stop in a pleasant park on Fan Leng Lau Road in Fanling, where I could enjoy a McDonald’s double Angus burger and fries. The customary cold beers once we got home were a fitting reward for having clocked 62.7km on the day’s ride. Although my wrist still feels sore, it is getting better.