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Here now, for all you size queens out there, is a time lapse video of the Amorphophallus titanum, also known as the Titan arum, also known as the corpse flower:
Currently it is on display at the Panaewa Rainforest Zoo in Hilo. So here now is a lovely picture of that very flower, taken by Sonia Martinez on 2011.04.16:
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2011.04.19, 5:20 p.m. Hawaii time]
[BILL enters, stage left. No one is watching. This blog is a ghost town....]
1) EMERGENT ME. I took February off from blogging due to a busy life. Mostly mine has been filled with lots more YARDWORK. Learning to juggle multiple priorities (also housework, writing more regularly, maintaining a trickle of income) without overdoing it all has been a challenge. So blogging had to go. Plus, it is less pleasurable for me than it used to be, due to ongoing battles with body pain resulting from years of typing, editing, and publishing. Even with an ergonomically decent chair and keyboard setup, after 15 minutes in this seat, everything starts to hurt. (Alas, no laptop computer option due to our ongoing "starving artist austerity program," ha ha.) So the body ain't what it used to be, although the physique itself is buff these days, thanks to all that yardwork ... like I said, emergent me. Always.
2) EMERGENT PLANTS. So anyway, today's shots are of the side yard's wild hibiscus, whose vivid red flower has this odd cap shape to it, rather than the fluffy look of the more cultivated ones. The cultivated varieties don't do too well in this zone -- they're better adapted for drier climes. (There is one tree like that here; it always suffers from rot.)
This lean and mean one, though, is bursting out all over the yard now (Christmas in March, huzzah!), thanks to my efforts back in December with the handsaw, when I slashed away a bunch of the creepy rotting jungle that had served as a visual barrier between this household and the neighbors. Did I say overdoing it? But sometimes, truly, one must destroy the town in order to save the village, or something like that. (I'm still yanking up years' worth of accumulated stinky maile, which I expect to be an ongoing project.)
The strange thing about this process is that every time I removed an ugly or stinky invasive species, buried beneath it was some kind of tiny, lovely, struggling beauty, whether a native species or a naturalized one -- huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Get it? EMERGENT.
It has been like slaying the dragon in order to get to the jewel buried within the cave.
Dirty, stinky, sweaty work.
Meanwhile, in deference to said neighbors' expressed wishes for restored privacy (ahem, heh), I have been doing plenty of hedge planting.
One must plant something in place of the old overgrowth anyhow, or the invasives grow right back. So there have been lots of opportunities for me to learn about cultivating emergent plants! Stay tuned! (So many pix to post, so little time....)
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent (liberator of struggling underplants everywhere) [this page last updated: 2011.03.02, 10:50 p.m. Hawaii time]
Greetings, all --
Mostly I just wanted to post something beautiful today, so that I could start to push that rather ugly picture of my Mockaroni Salad further down the page. Trust me, it tasted way better than the pic makes it appear. But I really like that dish it's in. So maybe the post was really about the dish anyhow!
No, not really. But here, before I ramble, is a picture I took of an azalea in bloom. And there is a story behind it.
About a year ago, I moved about an hour away in order to house-sit for some friends, who had their house on the market and wanted someone living on the premises to take care of things, and to discourage burglars. They had this giant azalea bush (more like a tree) in the front yard. It was forever sending off these incredible showers of flowers because, well, it's Hawaii, and plants are always blooming here. The ground below was carpeted in magenta.
Unfortunately, right after I moved in, they gave their house back to the mortgage bank instead, since they could not keep up with the payments. There's a backstory to that, too, about how they kept showing up to remove the fixtures from their house, now that they were losing it and building a new one, and how this created a lot of stress and difficulty for me. And so I moved again, two months after I'd moved everything in.
On the way out of the house-sit, I took a few plants out of the ground because they were about to go untended for an indefinite period of time. (Banks don't tend to show up to garden their repos.) The azalea, which had given me so much pleasure, had given birth to a baby azalea. It was really easy to dig the baby plant out of the ground and put it into a pot. And then I replanted it into a bigger pot, and a year later, here we are.
I've been changing my computer desktop's wallpaper a lot lately, but this is one image that will stick around for a while. The bloom is gone now, but I can still look at this image, remember parts of the house-sitting experience that I enjoyed, and let the rest of it go.
Caring for plants can be effective therapy, don't you think?
It helps me to remember that it's not all about us.
Easy to say, hard to live by.
Wishing you a beautiful world,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2011.01.26, 8:57 p.m. Hawaii time]
OK, now that we're back into a "local color" groove, here's some local color. I snapped these pix on the fly earlier this week. I about to leave the local supermarket's parking lot when this blazing beast pulled in. Not the greatest shots, but as you can see, flower power ain't dead; it just sprouted up on [or maybe spewed out of?] the Puna District's volcanic soil.
The legend across the front reads, "Hopper's Hippie Art, 808-937-6049." So now, should you want to drive in your very own Magical Mystery Tour, or get a wall treatment in an Incense and Peppermints motif ... you know who to call!
[NOTE: You can click on any of the photos to pop up a larger copy with greater detail. Please note that the management is not responsible for any acid flashbacks.]Wishing you a beautiful, groovy, and sunshiny day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2010.12.17, 2:15 a.m. Hawaii time]
This flower is the latest in my series of local wild flowers. (Click to the previous posts to see more.)
This picture looks especially great when you click on it to zoom to a larger view. This plant grows everywhere in these parts! So it seems to be a really invasive type of flowering plant, but I love it anyhow. Any guesses as to what this one is called?
Please reply via the Comments section if so!
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2010.08.12, 4:10 p.m. Hawaii time]
