Morning light on coconuts!

A very typical view while inside a passenger jeepney along the seashore in an early morning. I go home to the city for work usually on a Sunday afternoon. This time i tried leaving early Monday morning. I realized i should try doing this more often, but hopefully i have a few minutes to shoot the beach.

These are young coconut trees. This is a stony seashore so not very much frequented by swimmers. But fishermen with lovely small boats ply these waters often.

Skywatch at the 5th Floor Window

These are some of the dry season sunsets in our 36°C hot and humid tropics. Sunsets are like DNAs or fingerprints, no two sunsets are the same. They change suddenly in a minute or a few minutes. So when at home in my 5th Floor Window in the big city, i make sure i always look at them. And they never fail to amaze me. 

   

Pet at the 5th Floor

Pets inside condominium units are not allowed, except for aquarium fishes. By pets they mean animals, i suppose. But who else will say that a pet can only be an animal. Pets are loved, cared for, given sustenance regularly, pampered sometimes and, i am sure many of you will agree with me, getting the most hours from the owners/masters. That is my premise for calling this plants or flowers as my pets. Immediately after arriving from the office and entering my unit 'this pet' takes the first attention, next to turning on the lights. It even gets ahead than changing clothes.

The routine gets the same when i leave in the morning, checking, watering, etc, etc that a plant requires.

Our Hippeastrum puniceum originally are planted on the ground in my home in the province. With my new passion of collecting hippeastrum, i dug some bulbs and planted them in my city condominium unit at the 5th Floor. Its planter is outside my west window, receiving only direct afternoon sun. I take photos of every angle, every growth stage and every possible positions. I bet you do that to your babies and your pets! What else is new!

 At this stage, the pollen hasn't opened fully yet. There are two blooms in a scape, and out of 14 bulbs only two of them bloomed ahead. Scape is the hollow stem where the flowers grow.

You can see the window of the next unit, but its curtain provided a nice background for my pet flower.

But i have something to confess, despite the above nice  photos, the two scapes differed from each other very much. The above scape is too short compared to the normal length of its scape.

And you will see here their actual performance. The one on the left has 19 inches long scape, longer than the normal ones grown on the ground at home. On the other hand, the one on the right showed the total opposite, at its very short scape of only 3 inches. They received equal treatments, as far as I am concerned, but their performance has been giving a big challenge to my knowledge on plant physiology. I guess stress affects all plant growth performance and functions, but the effects differ among plants. How i wish i can put more time and attention to researching these anomalies, but i am not in actual research anymore. So i guess i will just let it be, and be happy with the differential performance of my pets. At least they provided more challenge and enthusiasm. I didn't know growing hippeastrum can be very interesting. 

Ruby Red

 Our extremely hot (>36°C) and humid dry season did not deter these plants to flower profusely.  This salvia somehow showed some decrease in growth of the stems, and decreased length of spikes but they are as lovely as during the colder months.

Bougainvillea, of all our ornamental plants, likes our dry months to show more flowers. Usually, the flowers are in sets of threes. They look so elegant in their tall pedestals when viewed this way.