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Nature notes 2022 (6) - roofed with gold
May. 3rd, 2022 08:36 pmToday the Pterocarpus indicus was in bloom all over the city. This is a tree common all over Southeast Asia, under a wide variety of names: Burmese rosewood, padauk, angsana, amboyna. It is one of the timbers sold commercially as rosewood. The wood is a bright red-brown, heavy, solid and beautifully figured, a very high-grade timber.
It has small, golden yellow, scented flowers that last for only a day or two, and cover the whole tree in gold when they open. In the monsoon tropics, the flowers bloom at the end of the hot season, just before the rains. They need a specific combination of high temperatures (like the 40C daily ones we've had for the last six weeks) combined with a short but heavy rain (your standard afternoon convection downpour). In seasonless Equatorial Asia they bloom at random when they get that particular combination of heat and rain.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pterocarpus+indicus+in+full+bloom&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images
I was so lucky. I happened to have lunch out today, so I saw them all over in my immediate neighbourhood and downtown, shining golden in the sun.
It has small, golden yellow, scented flowers that last for only a day or two, and cover the whole tree in gold when they open. In the monsoon tropics, the flowers bloom at the end of the hot season, just before the rains. They need a specific combination of high temperatures (like the 40C daily ones we've had for the last six weeks) combined with a short but heavy rain (your standard afternoon convection downpour). In seasonless Equatorial Asia they bloom at random when they get that particular combination of heat and rain.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pterocarpus+indicus+in+full+bloom&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images
I was so lucky. I happened to have lunch out today, so I saw them all over in my immediate neighbourhood and downtown, shining golden in the sun.
