Travel Theme: Flowers

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Marianne under Axarquía, Photo challenges

Despite being known in Spain as Flor de Pascua (Easter flower), thousands of Poinsettia plants adorn roadways and roundabouts here on the southern coast of Andalucía, around Christmas-time each year.

What you actually see are vivid red leaves (known as bracts) surrounding a cluster of greenish flowers, almost too small to be noticeable. The true flowers are like little vases no larger than a pea, and on its side each has a yellow cup, a gland, brimming with glistening sticky nectar that, if you taste it, is as sweet as honey.

The plant is named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, an American diplomat and amateur botanist, who saw it growing in Mexico as a roadside weed and later introduced the first plant into the US in 1825.

This post is my response to the Travel Theme photo challenge – Flowers

Other interpretations:

52 Pick Up – Flowers

Have you ever ….

Flowering snapshot of a January day around the garden

Summer Breeze – makes me feel fine

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Marianne under Axarquía, Slice of Life

I wonder if the Isley Brothers found the inspiration for their classic 70s hit “Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind” after a visit to the eastern Costa del Sol on a warm, summer Mediterranean evening?

If they did, then the heady fragrance of the flowers of the Dama de Noche (otherwise known as the night-scented jasmine, lady of the night or, to use the Latin name – cestrum nocturnum) was surely the catalyst.

By day, the Dama de Noche masquerades as an upright, fairly ordinary looking shrub with dark green leaves and large clusters of small, lime green buds, with no perfume.

As dusk falls, however, the buds open into white, star-shaped tubular flowers and their bewitching, intense scent is wafted around on the breeze and can often be detected for hundreds of metres around.