The quest of what the yellow tubular flower that grows behind building #3 in our society is, has I hope, finally ended.
The earlier shot was so wrong, 'misunderestimation' will sound like an understatement. if I tell this to a professional botanist, he will get a stomach-ache from laughing. I mean, only a complete git will identify Yellow Bells (Tecoma stans; Hindi piliya and Tamil swarnapatti) as the not-all-that-similar-shaped Yellow Oleander (Cascabela thevetia).
And that is because I did not look at the leaves. Even after sticking a picture in the post which had the leaves in it. Second time I go to look at the leaves of the plant, and they are like the leaves of the rose, and not the long, thin leaves of the yellow oleander. Git, git, git.
The identification got this far because I hit upon a good resource for online flower pictures - Flowers of India.
And here's a good page for the Tamil names of flowers - Medicinal Plant Conservation Park of southern India Database, which records plants from Kerala, Tamil Nadu & Karnataka.
Of course, the real way to solve the whole thing is to take a picture of the Real mcCoy, and put it up here for someone to identify, but I am a self-confessed dork with the camera.
Moral of the story: anyone who does botany with flowers alone is a blooming idiot, because you can't leave out the leaves.
Picture Credits:-
Yellow bells - Flowers of India.
Yellow oleander - Dev Kumar Vasudevan.
Comments