WEEDS

Today's weather - sunny

These are some interesting weeds on the forest floor. The first is the germinating Cerbera odollam (common name: Pong Pong) seedling. The second shows a young Stachytarpheta plant (common name: Snakeweed) while the last two shows a beautiful Ludwigia which grows in boggy or wet soils. How splendid!

SEED

The white fluffy thing in the photo is not the seed of the Stachytarpheta indica (common name: Common Snakeweed, Indian Snakeweed) from the Verbenaceae Family.

The seeds are dispersed by wind and it just so happened that the parent plant was nearby. The white fluffy hairs attached to the small seed carried it with the wind and it got lodged to this flower.

I was so preoccupied with the seed that I almost forgot to mention the parent plant Calotropis gigantea (common name: Crown Flower, Giant Milkweed) from the milkweed Family Asclepiadaceae. In fact, the seeds of Asclepias curassavica (common name: Blood Flower) look similar.

STACHYTARPHETA

I came across this small red-flowered Snakeweed Plant a few months ago.

So cuttings were taken for our nursery to propagate. Finally I planted it in HortPark's Car Park Garden around the Chinese New Year period and these photos were taken on 17 Feb 10.

The flowers may be much smaller than the more common blue-flowered Stachytarpheta indica planted throughout various areas of HortPark, but they are actually quite conspicuous. Too bad, the photos did not capture the right intensity of the red colour.