Sunday, September 27, 2009

Globba - torches of the undergrowth

Any casual visitors of the Malay, Thai or Borneo forests would inadvertently find some of these smallish herbs with their brightly coloured inflorescence in red, pink or yellow burning at the dark undergrowth. There are about 100 species of this highly unusual gingers and identification of the species is not at all easy - one of the keys is to count the number of anther appendages in the flower - in this case you can see 4 pointy spikes at the top.

This plant appears to be Globba patens

2 comments:

Hermes said...

That's a coincidence, I was looking at some for sale only the other day.

http://www.alohatropicals.com/Gingers_Globba.html

Claude said...

Interesting... here they would be considered exotic and unusual, and there, they are common wildflowers.

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