I love photographing flowers, so just because I was in a foreign country, where the landscape, architecture, people, food and language (not to mention bicycles) were completely different and should've been capturing my photographic eye, doesn't mean I was about to give up shooting flowers. After all, a lot of them are foreign and exotic, and even the ones I recognized, like lantana, grow huge and perennial there; amaryllis grows out of the ground like daylilies here (which by the way originate in Asia...)
.This I shot very early on, shortly after departing the pottery shard temple. It's a sensitive plant—those things that close their leaves when you touch them. With a pretty flower, which I'd never seen before.
.These gardenias (not, I don't think, after some brief researches on google) were growing on the grounds of the cham towers.
Another shot. I'd heard gardenias had thick petals, which these certainly do. But if they're not gardenias...then what are they? Pretty, at any rate. Update: they're plumaria, also known as frangipani; they are the flowers used in leis. (My thanks to the reader who emailed me this info—I didn't have a clue how to research something for which I only had a picture!)
I love that lush, lush green. Rice fields display all hues, from pale when the rice is just sprouting, to green so intense it hardly looks real, to a golden green that signals the end of the growing season for that particular plot of rice. I tried capturing the beautiful white cranes that fly amongst the rice fields, but simply didn't have the telephoto for it.
As it turns out, lotus not only make beautiful subjects for embroidery, the pods are edible as well: I think this farm was primarily growing them for food. —You eat the bean-shaped objects inside the holes of the round, flat-topped pods: you can see two of them sticking up sideways, in the background, and third partially occluded by the left side of the flower. But what an incredible visual bonus! (And we were allowed to get out and slosh amongst the flowers, and try raw lotus. Very cool.)
The colors were so intense that, put on a postcard, they'd look artificially punched up. Never have I seen a pink so bright in nature.
I once saw a film about harvesting lotus flowers, specifically the buds. (There was a beautiful temple, too, and an old monk...it's been a long time, and what I primarily recall from the film was the mood: serenity of gathering the blossoms versus the frustrations of selling them in the city. The woman gathering them is finally put of business by people selling plastic lotuses, which were ugly. Why anyone would bother is beyond me, but I suppose that's because cut flowers are never, for me, part of a ritual obligation or religious observation—as they might be in Vietnam, flowers being one of the five objects put in shrines.)
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
