Lantana Camara

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Ghaneri

During the many walks around my hometown back in rural North-Eastern Goa, I got acquainted with a lot of flowers. This time I decided to blog about the neglected Ghaneri flowers that grow along the roadsides. These flowers have a foul odour to them, hence the local name Ghaneri which means smelly or stinking.

These lantana shrubs grow up to 2-3 meters in height and stand upright, sometimes leaning on other plants for support. The leaves are small, oval shaped with a somewhat rough texture. The flowers, tubular in form, bloom in many dome-shaped heads and range in colours from yellow and orange to red and pink The shrubs when in bloom are a delight to the eyes.

Ghaneri (Lantana Camara)

Butea Monosperma (Palash)

Sunday, March 04, 2018

Flame of the Forest

Palash (Butea monosperma)

I spent the summer of 2017 at my cousin's place in Sindhudurg, Maharashtra. I have a lot of good memories attached with that place. One of them were the evening walks. We used to walk a distance of four-five km and back. It is a rural area and all there was to see were trees -- lots of them. I remember one perfectly. The orange canopy of the flowering tree glowing like a fire in the evening sun and breeze, cast a shadow on the road. My6 cousin said the flowers were called Palash. I picked one up from the many that had fallen on the road. Here is some more information that I managed to gather.

The Palash flower grows on a medium-sized deciduous tree whose growth is very slow. The flowers are bright reddish orange. The flowers are used to make colours on the festival of Holi as per tradition. It is also used as a dye for fabric. The benefit of having a Palash tree near your house is more than just visual gratification. The flowers give off a smell that attracts mosquitoes which use the flower's fluids to lay eggs. These eggs, fortunately for us, never hatch, and mosquitoes can get stuck in the fluids and die.