A break from orchids

As the orchids have petered out traveling further east I’ve started looking at other plants and flowers. This image above may look like a boring little everlasting type flower but it’s when you look closer at numerous individual flowers and think about them, study them, that it starts to get interesting. This flower is like a little multi rocket launcher, rocket tubes opening up from the centre and the individual flowers begin to unfurl twisting their way up out of their launch tubes.

Before launching themselves, leaving behind little trails of smoke or rather wispy fluff out their backside, which henceforth shall be known as “bum fluff”. Admittedly I don’t know how long they stay unfurled for, looking like a nice flower before they launch, I do know that if you knock a flower it can launch multiple rockets without warning.

I’m not sure whether these are fertilized and contain seed within them or if the seeds are still retained within the main head (rocket launcher) of the flower. The bum fluff catches easily on things and causes all sorts of tangles.

Some of them are mass launchers.

While others not so much.

Now the second strange plant of the day. Check this one out, you can see little remnants of it’s stamens on the inside of those strange spiky arms, little stalks with white balls on the end.

OK, if you were looking closely there’s the elephant in the room, or rather the insect on the flower in the background. I didn’t notice it at first because it was so small, snapping away, wondering what that annoying little “hair” was in the background.

It’s tiny, less than 1cm long. But getting back to the flower and the stamens you can see inside. I found plenty of others which were still in flower with petals, so I’m guessing this next one is before pollination.

And then once pollinated, what starts as a small spiny bit behind the flower swells up till it forms like this.

Ahh the joys of a macro photography, often you may have no idea what you are actually photographing till you get back later and look at you images on a decent screen. And also the reason why I always try to check my photos on the laptop as often as possible. In the past I’ve checked the photos days later after traveling on, only to find I wished I could go back and take more photos of something I hadn’t noticed at the time. This plant was something I’d been walking passed for days on the edge of the track and today I stopped to take a couple of pictures before going back to look at them on the laptop, wow, I was straight out to get more pictures so I could understand it better.

 

It was a day filled with discoveries for me today, how can something be both shiny and hairy at the same time? Wonder no more.

 

I’ve gone off orchids and ended up with weird plants then insects and flies, get a grip man.

 

Back to orchids again, that feels far more comfortable.