what plant is this?

I got the seeds of this heretofore unknown plant from a friend’s house. It’s got pink blooms, has soft brown branches, grows like a shrub, dies in winter but returns in spring. What is it?

Until it flowers, I won't be able to identify it. Le sigh...

flowers in my garden

Bright, colorful, swoon-worthy beauties, courtesy of my garden—both vegetable and otherwise.

golden lantana

tomato

peas

bush beans

eggplant

asparagus yardlong

zucchini

blue daze early in the morning

another blue daze at noon

mexican petunia

indian hawthorne flower

I love flowers now, but that wasn’t the case before.

You see, I grew up in a very bucolic setting—in the midst of a sleepy farming village in the heart of Northern Philippines.

The lifestyle is very simple: fathers go out to the ricefields at 5:00 in the morning, mothers stay at home to tend to the children (or teach in the local public schools), grandparents spoil the kids with the occasional dirty ice cream treat, and kids climb trees and frolic in clear streams after school and during the weekend.

There’s not much trimmings in our daily lives, too.  That meant no dinners out in fancy restaurants for the whole family. The only good restaurants were the ones for travelers, and the menu is equally no-frills rice and viands.

So no fancy expensive cut flowers on Valentine’s Day either...save perhaps the calabaza blooms that fathers usually bring home for a tasty vegetable soup called dinengdeng.

Growing up with that hefty dose of practicality at home and in the community, I didn’t think much of the beauty of flowers. The ones that I liked were meant for eating, not gazing at. The few times I saw boys give flowers to the girls they liked, I marveled at the waste of money that went with the gesture.

But I feel different now. I’ve begun to appreciate the biblical connotation to flowers—that God takes better care of us humans than the flowers in the field which, despite their stunning beauty, are gone in a flash.

And that is why, I don’t berate my husband anymore when he buys me beautiful long-stemmed golden roses for special days, heh.

extreme drought in volusia

So, a couple of days ago, I was griping about how our weather  has been unseasonably warm this year.

It appears our part of the country had it particularly bad compared to the rest. Florida had been running the whole gamut, from "Abnormally Dry" to "Exceptional Drought":

Volusia County, where Orange City is situated, is in Extreme Drought.

The drought outlook for the next three months predict some improvements--there's still drought, but not so much as now. (What, rain teasers but no downpours? We get cloudy days but whatever precipitation these overcast skies deliver doesn't even touch the ground.)

screencap from National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center

Not something our firefighters in Florida would love to know, eh?

Time to do the rain dance?

Nah. I'll stick to the Rosary--I'll ask Mama Mary to get us some much-needed rain...without the floods. Just enough so it'll be Mother Nature watering the gardens daily (or even every other day), instead of me, heh.

bok tower gardens

A while back—way, way back—R (my sister-in-law) had a prenup photo shoot and she asked one of our Sunshine friends to arrange it.

Friend A brought us all the way to Lake Wales, where the Bok Tower Gardens were. It was a pretty long drive—about 2 hours, including the pit stops for leaks—and by the time we were a few minutes a-ways, some of us were already on the wrong side of hypoglycemia.

We started out very early (in my opinion) and us 3 girls—Friend A, the bride-to-be, and hubby's assistant (me)—were cramped in the backseat of hubby’s Dakota. (Both boys—hubby the driver and the groom-to-be, where comfortably seated out front, argh!)

No legroom, leaky plumbing,  a grumbling stomach and I was all moody and quiet.

Good thing the destination more than made up for the grumpy ride.

the singing tower, as seen from the gardens

Bok Tower Gardens is one helluva botanical garden—tastefully landscaped and so picturesque, it was total eye candy for a sightseeing and photography junkie like me.

majestic oaks and love seats make for a poignant afternoon

a bench perfect for some romantic tryst

total eye candy, if you ask me

even the heron was a beautiful sight!

So I had fun click-click-clicking my way through the garden while running on the heels of a soon-to-be-hitched couple and their photographers.

(I took these pictures using Friend A's camera because mine—unfortunately—died on me in the first 5 minutes of getting to Bok Tower. The too-early morning wake up call scrambled my brains and I left behind my batteries...no pun intended.)

One of the things I love—something I thought was only for wimps when I was younger because it was so cheesy—is flowers. The more colorful and unusual they are, the better. (I’ll perorate later on the whys and wherefores of my flower love.)

I shot some really nice flowers on that hottish August day:

watchful yellow justicias

fiery red bromeliads in a row

stately and regal blue agapanthus blooms

(I'll let you in on a secret though: it took me hours—hours, I tell you!—to identify these flowers.)

Some stuff about Bok Tower Gardens:

• The gardens, spanning some 50 acres of land, were designed by famous landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
• It appears that the rolling greens of Bok Tower Gardens were originally “arid sandhills”, sporting only “virgin pines and sandhill scrub”
• Edward Bok—erstwhile editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1880s and Pulitzer Prize author—asked Olmsted to do the landscaping to preserve the “hilltop and create a bird sanctuary”
• There's a self-guided tour of the Pinewood Estate gardens and Mediterranean-style mansion (included in the National Registry of Historic Places), but for a fee
• The pride of Olmsted’s gardens is a 205-foot Singing Tower crafted in the art-deco and neo-Gothic style.
• The carillon tower has 60 bells and rings every half hour, though I can’t remember hearing it at the time. (I think there were some repairs being made.)

the singing tower, up close and personal

the whole shebang, all 205 feet of it

The only other carillon that I’ve loved is the one in UP Diliman, my alma mater:

the UP carillon tower and plaza. when i first attended the
state university this area wasn't as beautiful as it is now.
image by boink_99

One of these days, I'm definitely going to return to Bok Tower Gardens and when I do, I'm going to make sure I have my camera and lots of extra batteries (this time, pun intended)! I intend to explore and shoot to my heart's content.