Ashy's on-line vegetarian cookbook   more photos   recipes   stories   cartoons   video clips

Pictures of flowers by Ashy Macbean

I take a lot of photos of flowers, but they don't all come out as well as I'd hope. Here are some of the better ones. I plan to keep adding to the collection every time I strike lucky and manage to shake a nice picture out of my camera. Eventually this will be a lovely page.

If you like these, you might like my Flowers of Kazakhstan page (although the quality of the pics isn't so good there).

This is a hibiscus flower I found growing on Lama Island in Hong Kong. I guess it wasn't a wild plant as it was growing by the edge of a footpath, near a village. It's lovely, but. isn't it? Datura somniferum...I think. Some kind of cultivated variety of Datura anyway. These were growing near the Golden Temple, on a forested hill just north of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan provence in south-west China.
These wild crocuses were growing on Mount Araghats, the highest mountain of modern Armenia. Like many high mountain plants, they don't flower for long. I took these pictures at the end of May, but when I returned ten days or so later, there were none left. I thought the flowers were so beautiful, I had to take a whole pile of photographs. Everywhere I looked there was a better shot to take. It was difficult to pick the best ones for this page, but I think it's these two.
Water lilies floating in a wee pond in Da Li, Yunnan, China. I always expect to see frogs sitting on the leaves of water lilies, but I never do. These beautiful orchids were growing in baskets tied to the trees in Discovery Bay shopping mall, Lantau I sland, Hong Kong.

This flower and the following ones were growing in Penang botanic gardens so they may not be native to Malaysia.

This one was growing on a woody vine and had a texture like wax.

I had to climb partway up a small tree to take this photo. I gues if I had been a week earlier the tree would have been covered with flowers and I wouldn't have had to climb. As it was, these were the only fresh flowers left on the tree.
I don't know the names of any of these three flowers, but I can offer one botanical fact about this species. The orange and yellow bits that look like petals are not really petals. They are, I think, called calyxes. On most species of flowers calyxes are small and green and found behind the petals. In this species and others like it, the true petals are vestigal. Is this cheating? I took this picture at a flowershop in in Riga. Looks good but, eh? There were lot's of flower shops in the same street but this was the best one.

Creative Commons License ©Ashy Macbean