STOP PRESS! Grand-daughter Arrives!

Yes, I know that all new-born babies look alike, and that all parents (even going back to the immediate ancestors thereof) go positively ga-ga when they arrive.

So just let me indulge myself, and congratulate my son, Ollie, and Becca (who did all the heavy lifting) for producing the gorgeous Molly.

Don't Go Down to the Swamps Today...

...because the Nipa Palm flower may get you.

The nipa flower's the nearest thing to a space monster that I've ever seen. They look as if they're about to come bursting and bubbling out like distinctly unfriendly extra-terrestrials. Just like Day of the Triffids. And they're big.

The flower usually grows more than a metre high, and in the fetid darkness of the brackish swamps that nipa palms inhabit, they stand out like, well, aliens.

Later, a seed head will grow, with about 40 large seeds, each enclosed in a strong husk, the whole about the size of a basketball. The seeds themselves are often called 'vegetable ivory' and are reputed to be carved by native tribesmen somewhere or other.

I tried carving them myself, but they didn't live up to their advance billing.

The nipa palm (Nypa frutescens) itself is quite innocuous, as are the flowers, of course.

The leaves are used as roofing material , widely available as roughly 4ft x 15" 'tiles', at about 8ç each. They don't last a lifetime, but they are waterproof, and a lot cooler than the corrugated iron sheets that are nowadays replacing them.

They don't need to be 'farmed' as such, but nipa stands do have owners, so be careful to ask if you want a nipa seed head as a souvenir.

The flowers, when they have grown seed heads, are tapped, like coconut flowers, for their sweet sap, which is then distilled to make pa-oroi, a strong-tasting liquor which, thankfully, is very cheap. (It's the local hooch that I mention in my blog title; I usually buy it by the 5-gallon jerry can).

I keep my hooch in a plastic water dispenser with a tap. It is half-filled with coconut-shell charcoal, that filters out the fairly awful natural taste of the pa-oroi.

My original intention was to make fruit-flavoured liquors of the stuff, by macerating some of the local fruits in it, but each time I tried that, I took to tasting it frequently, and none of my efforts ever matured, as they should have done, for more than a month.

Cheers!

PS 1 I just found I did this same story about a year ago at: http://smallislandnotes.blogspot.com/2007/10/pa-oroi.html Shows how forgetful pa-oroi makes you.

PS 2 A wonderful photo-essay on the making of pa oroi, or laksoy, as the Butuanons call it (about 3 hours drive from Surigao City is at EatingAsia:
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2008/04/sago-isnt-the-o.html

Katambak

Katambak (the local name for sea bream) are various different kinds of Snappers.

This one (Sailfin Snapper - Symphoricthys spilurus) is not typical at all.

It has those long 'tails' from its dorsal fin and its anal fin.

Otherwise, it's quite tasty.

The fish already has a very nice camouflage pattern along its sides, like a not-very-good artist trying to paint waves, but it's got those long, functionally useless streamers from its fins.

When I look at an animal like this, I wonder why it did it. Why grow long tails from its fins? Sexual advertisement, or what ?

Perhaps it's a very good example of 'costly signalling', ie, that it can afford an extra bit of showing-off to attract a mate (think peacocks' tails).

Jungle Terror Orchid

This is part of an orchid that grows on the second coconut tree down in my garden. It's the sexy bit, the bit that makes insects (mostly bees) come in to pick up pollen.

I've not seen such a greedy image in nature before. It has little beady eyes, and a gaping mouth, and even little hands at each side. And it's got a big wide-open bag to hold all the victims it finds, for future consumption.

It even appears to have arms and hands, to drag its victims into its ever-open pouch.

But don't those insects ever watch movies?

The creature at the heart of this flower is a copy (or perhaps the inspiration?) for the creature that burst into the world in Alien.

H.R.Giger's wonderful inspirations for the original film were great, but the first Alien was aggressive.:

The second film, though, showed a more seductive Alien, and Sigourney Weaver fell for it.

Francoise On The Beach - Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was often in love but perhaps his greatest love was Francoise Gilot (companion between 1944 and 1953). Or, at least from his pictures it would seem so. She was not, in fact the most beautiful girl in the world (very Greek, with a long nose, and certain things going around the corners of her mouth that would produce hard wrinkles later).

But, in this tender series of drawings, Picasso created her essence in a very, very few simple lines. He did these sketches (or etched them, which is about the same thing), in the first few years that he knew her, and I once had one of the prints from a limited edition.

That is, he didn't capture her essence, but his idea of it. She was, undoubtedly, a lovely lady.


Here is a sketched etching of her (I've been vandal enough to put a Technicolor background to it.)


Picasso's artistic shorthand was amazing; here are a very few simple short lines, giving the very essence of the woman he loved.

"The sketch is like a tree; a trunk growing up from the narrow neck to fruit in abundance".

(No it isn't; he drew the face first, and the neck afterward; but why not give a bit of desconstructionable bullshit).

And just look at those simple, simple lines; total and absolute confidence in exactly where they will go, and exactly what they will shape.

Picasso really was a faux naïf genius, and I'll go on to say a bit more about him in later posts.

Francoise went on, from Picasso, to marry Dr. Jonas Salk, the co-inventor of the polio vaccine. For one woman to marry two geniuses (genii?) in a lifetime is a more than considerable achievement.

Plants, Fruit and Trees of Siargao - 249 photos

I am so impressed by the identification of my talikubo that I've put an album of photographs on the net here at Flickr or here at my webhost.

I've only just joined Flickr today, so I'm not entirely sure how it works. Hope I've got it right. That shows only 200 photos, until I dig in my pocket and update.

The second is to my website host, with all 249 photos, so, if you don't mind, since it has no comments section yet, please e-mail me here, but please head your message Plant Identification, so I don't dump you in the spam box with the Nigerian, Lottery, and Viagra scammers.

I would dearly love to have some help with identifications.

Somebody Reads This Blog! Talikubo Update

Isn't the internet wonderful!

Within hours of posting my question on Talikubo, I had an answer from a gentleman from Texas, Brandon McHenry

The plant you have on your blog for which you are looking for an identity is Dischidia cleistantha.

[It certainly is - here's the flower]

Dischidia is a family of epiphytes from SE Asia and Australasia. It is closely related to Hoya although it is vegetatively a much smaller plant and the flowers are usually not showy. Almost all of the species have close relationship with ants and many have evolved interesting vegetative aspects to attract ants. They are some with pouch leaves where ants can build nests within, another type have disk shaped leaves pressing against the trunk which again act as ant shelter. Two other types of Dischidia are not designed to attract ants (although they usually are found around the aerial ant nests), having either flat thick leaves (as in D. hirsuta) or bearing small knob-like leaves along very long internodes (eg D. bengalensis). Researchers have traced the movement of radioactive carbon and nitrogen atoms from ants to plants, confirming that the plants assimilate matters brought in by the ants.

See this for photos of other Dischidia species.

I'll be peering round my Dischidia later this morning with a magnifying glass, looking for ants. I had no idea that these plants share their place in life (forgotten the technical term) with ants. That is, if it stops raining.


I also have at least one other Dischidia species in my garden, and other plants that may be related.

Number 1. I think I'll give myself the first chance of identifying this one. No flowers yet, but it has established itself well on the coconut tree I draped it over, a month or so ago.









Number 2.

This is also very weird. We found it in the jungle, wrapped tightly round a rotten piece of bamboo (see lower part of right hand photo).

The leaves have 'sucker pads' at each leaf base.

For a long time, it languished, but has recently grown some new leaves. It has now run out of bamboo, so perhaps it wonders where it's going to go next. Perhaps when it's finished wondering, it might put out some flowers, in gratitude for having a new home, and even some very casual care.

I'm afraid that Brandon McHenry is going to get deluged with Identify This! requests from me.

I'll be blogging some more about weird Philippine plants from time to time.

Newer Posts

I´m on a roll now. I've just found out how to post stories into the future, so I've got half a dozen stories ready to roll out over the next week or so.

I'll be doing this often; it's cheating the system, I know, but when I've got the blogging mood in my brain, I may as well take the best advantage of it.

Talikubo - Can Anyone Tell me What This Is?

This is one of the weirdest plants I've ever come across. It grows on tree-trunks here in the Philippines, and I only know its name (talikubo) in the local language, Surigaonon.

The leaf colours can vary from the pink-blushed green you see on the left (perhaps due to being in full sun?) to bright apple-green.

At first I thought it was a kind of fern, but then I see that it apparently has tiny flowers, that come out from underneath (?) the leaves . That's unusual for any flowering plant; most come out from the next node above the leaf.

I've only seen these flowers as they are shown here, like unopened buds.

Perhaps they open at night, or perhaps they're not flowers at all, but something else.

Note that, just below the second bunch of buds down, there's a strange naked phallic excrescence. Maybe it's a flower of the other gender, or maybe it's a new shoot going off to spread around another part of the tree.
If that's so, why does it grow up straight, and not have the sense to go out horizontally, right or left?

I wanted some of these plants to stick on my garden coconut trees, so I went to the jungle, and this is what I found when I stripped one off the tree

The leaves, pair by pair, are like a couple of inter-locking pieces of tortoise-shell armour. (the famous Roman testudo).

Underneath the close cover, the plant's colours are comfortably dark deep purple.

If I knew how to do it, I'd cue in a bit of Smoke on the Water at full volume about here, to make sure you're still reading.

The leaves' edges seal in the darkness and moisture enough to allow the roots to wander over surface of the tree trunk, and pick up nutrients. They don't have to leave their shelter, but some of them do.

This part is not especially strange; many creeping vines send out roots from their leaf nodes.

What is very strange is that this plant's leaves are not just silly old sunshine-pullers (which are wonderful enough), but have developed a strategy of hold-onto-all in convergence with limpets. Unlike limpets, though, they can't move; but they can send out another shoot, and thus progress over the tree bark.

I don't know of any other plants whose leaves have developed into small, domestic houses, where the leaf margins turn themselves into life-sustaining seals.

Barringtonia - Bito'On - Sea Poison Tree

I'm getting into this digital painting lark now, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

This is a crudely altered photo of a Barringtonia or bito'on tree flower.

The tree grows near the shore almost everywhere in the coastal areas of Island SE Asia and Oceania.

It's a wonderful shade tree, and when it's in the mood, produces these fabulous flowers, about three inches across, with a fan of stamens (pistils?) at dusk.

The next morning, they are moribund and abandoned on the ground, as this one was.

A lovely specimen of the tree used to grow in the churchyard in General Luna, but the holy Catholic vandals of that institution cleared it of this and several other beautiful trees.

But Barringtonia doesn't only produce flowers. The fruit look a bit like squared-off apples, and they're valuable. They float very well, so they're widely used as net-floats (and also as the way for Barringtonia to colonise new shorelines).

The area of their distribution is very, very near that of Austronesian languages, and of the natural distribution of coconuts.

And the flesh of the fruit is poisonous to fish. Don't fiddle about with big, bright yellow lures, just zap 'em.

See more about Barringtonia here : (Apologies if you don't go straight to the bookmark; I haven't updated this page for ages).

John Paul Ringo

I got into painting popes and stuff about twenty years ago, when I fell in love with a Venetian (or at least, a Veneto) aristocrat, (or at least, the daughter of a rich industrialist - a bit like that Berlusconi fellow who makes the colourful sweaters).

That happened just as a new Pope ( John Paul I (Latin: Ioannes Paulus PP. I, Italian: Giovanni Paolo I - "Il Sorriso di Dio" (God's Smile)., born Albino Luciani) was elected, and was murdered in a few weeks.

JP1 came from Veneto, and was much appreciated in north-eastern Italy. He was also a little bit too progressive for the College of Cardinals. So somebody did him in. After 33 days in office.

So they elected a new one, and Karol Józef Wojtyła took over.

He was a great guy, who kissed the ground of every country he ever went to, and invented the Popemobile.

But, besides being a lovely man, he was also a bit of a dumb conservative, and kept the Roman Catholic Church on a strait'n'narrow path for more than a quarter of a century.

During all that time, he faithfully followed Pope Montini's regressive path, and ensured the Holy Roman Catholic Church's irrelevance to the problems of the world today.

The Roman Catholic Church, that could be an enormous force for good, following the examples of Pope John XXIII, and the short-lived John Paul I, was lost forever.

My old painting of John Paul Ringo Superman is getting a bit mouldy now. I've done my best to clean him up, but it just doesn't work.

Them green lizards

We have a couple of 'daily lizards' around the place.

There are the always-present geckos. As I sit at my worktable in the evening, I can count around a dozen on the walls and ceiling around me.

They chatter, attack and rape each other, and are altogether a very useful digression from the problems of thinking and writing.

But we also have another lizard. The Emerald Green Skink - Lamproletis smaragdinus.

I featured them here. They are very beautiful; one of those things that you see occasionally, that give you immediate pleasure, just from their appearance - a bit like a bunch of silent hot air balloons crossing the escarpment in front of you, as they used to do, over the Chiltern Hills, when I lived in Tring, Hertfordshire. It's only when they pass directly overhead, and fart, as they boost the hot air, that you realise they are not disembodied spirits, but have bodily functions as well.

So when I saw one of my Emerald Lizards chomping a gecko, I was a little disappointed that he had very definite bodily functions, as well.