Tag: wildlife

These posts are about any plants and animals I happen to run into, whether or not they’re “wild”. Actually it’s mostly photos in gardens.

Singapore Changi Airport T1 Cactus Garden

When you think of Singapore, you don’t think of cacti, and an airport is pretty much the opposite of a garden, right? Yet Changi Airport boasts a cactus garden.

How do cacti even survive outdoors in Singapore? My guess is they’ve worked out the right kind of soil to drain water away from the plants, but what do I know. My thumbs are about as green as a fire engine.

Below are 10 photos I took of the cactus garden at Changi Terminal 1 while waiting for the gate to open for our flight to Phnom Penh.

Don’t make fun of the “wildlife” tag on this post. Obviously, this garden is the opposite of wild. I guess I’m just using the tag as shorthand for “plants and animals (and mushrooms, which aren’t even plants)”.

Continue reading Singapore Changi Airport T1 Cactus Garden

National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens

The National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens is my favorite local tourist attraction. It’s centrally located but feels like a universe apart from the skyscrapers and shopping malls.

Below are 23 photos from my latest visit.

Continue reading National Orchid Garden at the Singapore Botanic Gardens

Another “mystery” solved.

Remember how I failed to identify the botanical object in the Cold Storage Logo as an apple?

Yeah. Well, here’s another object I misidentified.

I more or less assumed it was a postmodern take on the aerodynamic bicycle helmet. Look at this actual bicycle helmet and tell me you don’t see the resemblance.

bike-helmet

But no, that giant sculpture by the escalator is a nutmeg seed. Nutmeg. And apparently the red stuff is called mace.

nutmeg-drawing

Who knew? I mean, in my experience, nutmeg usually looks like this:

nutmeg-jar

Well, maybe people who grew up in this part of the world would be more likely to recognize nutmeg than I would, since the spice islands of Indonesia are not too far from here. If not, the fact that nutmeg trees are local at least explains this particular art installation at Orchard Road.

Learn something new every day.

Fruit that looks like other objects

We bought this collection of objects (tray and wooden fruit) on our trip to Bali and Lombok, Indonesia.

It occurred to me that each fruit looks like some other object.

The one on the left, which would look like a star in cross-section, is a starfruit. It’s the most familiar of this batch to a North American.

The one that looks like a grenade is a durian. Those are famous for being stinky and prickly.

The scaly fig is a snake fruit (aka Salak). I ate one off a tree while hiking through the woods. It was sticky.

The one at the top is, I think, a rose apple (water apple), and looks like a nose in cross section. This one, however, looks very pear-like and has what look like leaves or a flower at the bottom, which is not typical in my experience. It might also be a pomegranate (delima); that would explain the structure at the bottom but not the pear shape.

The one that looks like a soccer ball is… actually I don’t know. Maybe a sugar apple (custard apple, srikaya)?

We figure we probably overpaid because the guy running the shop gave us the pear-looking-thing for free. I think he also wrote a lower selling price on the receipt and pocketed the difference.

Nevertheless, we love these strange wooden objects. They’re well made, and the detail on the snake fruit, in particular, is amazing.