Strelitzia (天堂鳥), as far as I know, is a perennial plant, native to South Africa. Some thirty or so such plants have been growing healthily in an oval-shaped flower bed in our public garden below. Each of its flowers resemble the look of a bird of paradise. In South Africa, it is commonly known as a crane flower. Today I spotted one fully-grown flower standing rigidly out of the big leaves.The orange and purple “feathers” spread spirally over the “bird’s" head. The green head is recognizable, but not conspicuous. To me, I welcome such plants so close at hand. They look very much like birds resting on some shrubs.
Wikipedia describes the leaves and flowers in detail as follows:
“The leaves of Strelitzia are large, 30–200 cm long and 10–80 cm broad, similar to a banana leaf in appearance but with a longer petiole, and arranged strictly in two ranks to form a fan-like crown of evergreen foliage. The flowers are produced in a horizontal inflorescence emerging from a stout spathe. They are pollinated by sunbirds, which use the spathe as a perch when visiting the flowers; the weight of the bird on the spathe opens it to release the pollen onto the bird's feet, which is then deposited on the next flower it visits.“
3 comments:
This flower is very pretty, elegant, long-lasting and useful. The plant at our backyard faithfully yields lots and lots of flowers every year. Very often we cut them for church ministries or for friends.
Well, in this case, you may open a flower shop selling this kind of beautiful flowers.
Oh well, perhaps we should sell them to a flower shop, but then giving them away for free seems to be more meaningful. Actually it is quite time consuming to cut the flowers as well as the leaves as we try to cut as deep down as possible.
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