Flora of the Island

I was going to wait and make this pretty post later in the line up, but the flowers in Bali are unbelievable. Many were familiar from my past trips to Central America and Hawaii, but so many were new that I have numbered the ones I don’t know. Here’s your chance, savvy gardeners and horticulturists. If you know what it is, please help me out and list the number and the name. It’s all much more fun than sitting with Google for a couple hours. Here they are, the flora of Bali as I saw it.

 First, the flowers that most of you might recognize from our annual gardens: New Guinea impatiens, and the flying flowers that go with them: black butterflies!

 

Alex and pummelos

 

Unknown #1

 

Unknown #2 

 

 Wild orchids

 

And some examples of what they do with flowers

 

Sprinklings of petals around the building posts, just because.

 

 Hallowed garden within a garden

 

 Adorning the temples

 

 At the market, being made into offering baskets

 

I loved the flower ladies at the market

 

A bent palm frond over an entry to our hotel patio. They tied flowers on to each dangling leaf one morning.

 

 

 Waterlilies

 

 

 Unknown #3

 

 Butterflies were plentiful. Here the gang stops to take a look at one.

 

Water hyacinth

 

Hibiscus

 

 Halliconia (small one – about 18 inches of flower chain)

 

Halliconia (large – about 3 feet of flowers in the chain)

 

 Bird of Paradise

 

 Angel’s Trumpet (in peach, even!)

Gloxinia (which I’ve only seen in pink and white until now) 

 

 These were bracts, not flowers – like poinsettia, but tree sized.

 

 My fav!! Plumeria or in Indonesian: Frangipani

 

 

The white are jasmine in a random stone water bowl by the sea. The red are used primarily in offering baskets, but they are Unknown #4. Yellow ones are Unknown #5

 

Every morning one of the ladies from the villa staff put an offering and incense out in a cove by the pool.  

 

 Canna (that would never, ever grow that nice even for a single summer on my deck in Seattle, as much as I want them to.)

 

 It took me almost two weeks to come up with the name of this one. Here it’s a vine: Mandevilla vine and is usually solid pink. There it’s a tree and two-tone.

 

True tropical water lily in the city. My mom can grow these in Minneapolis during the summer, but she has to start over every spring with new ones because of the cold. I could hear her in my head every time we passed one, “oh, they don’t have to take theirs in for the winter here… and they live!”