While awaiting the husky on Saturday, a lady came down from the steep path that forms the first flight up to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, asking excitedly if I could go see a flower she found by the road. From her description, I suspected it to be a bat lily, and so it was, about 50 m from the visitor centre. There were two plants, one with a faded inflorescence, the other freshly unfurled with a pair of sail-like outer bracts and filamentous inner bracts that seem more effective in drawing the attention of curious strollers than the services of crucial pollinators.
The flowers proper were still unopened, but had already won the admiration of the lady who pressed her husband to capture some images using his phone. During their future constitutionals, the couple are now likely to look out for signs of exuberance from this otherwise unremarkable rosette of a herb. From ascending the hill as weekend walkers blind to the biological diversity around them, they now walk in the steps of Wallace who prowled these foothills in days when the trees outnumbered the towers and sowed their winged progeny from knolls long gone and flattened.
that is uber pretty.
Posted by: silverdale florist | 17 March 2008 at 09:42 AM