Taking Time to Smell the Flowers...

For a country that is bland and blah - taupe, gray - sand and dust - credit must be given where it is due - to the many, many imported laborers who work as groundsmen and gardeners, here on our compound, to keep it green and colorful.

I did not do well with the camera to get the flowers on these trees. For a couple of weeks now, we've seen the flowers that have fallen off them on the ground and it was only just a few days ago I realized they were coming from the tip-top of these trees. Why? Because the gardeners spend so much time shaping the trees, but can only reach so high with their ladders - so only the very tops of the trees have the blooms [cannot tell you what kind of tree it is - do not know]:

No idea what the name of this tree is, either. This is the one in our back yard - in a pot - perhaps it should be in the ground. I suspect it is going to get big. Really, really big. We have one "clump" of white flowers on it. They smell "clean." A soapy kind of clean - or maybe more like citronella. The tree is strange. It loses every single leaf it has when it starts to get cold [relative term, I know] and then completely comes back to life in the spring with new green leaves - glossy and waxy - and now, big clumps of flowers.

This is the same kind of tree - what our little tree is going to grow up to be:

Every single day we walk by this hibiscus. And I say, "Will you look at that! How come that hibiscus has so many flowers on it - and more buds - and ours only has a couple of buds and every once in a while a bloom?" DH has gotten so that he mimics me when we walk past this bush in the morning as we are out and about with The Kids:

Hibiscus has no smell - and is nothing I would even give much thought to if it wasn't for the pop of color it generates. Not particularly gorgeous, but striking in a sea of green and tan and beige and gray and taupe.

I would never in a million years put orange and fuchsia bougainvillea together - but I think this just looks so pretty - makes my white bougainvillea look pretty bland - thankfully I've put some color into mine with the the blue purple jacquemontia to give it some color - along with the camel foot. Simply beautiful:

And, this, yellow lantana. We have pink. I do like the yellow. From what I understand, lantana is very slow growing. I'm not even going to bother putting more in. I'll just have to live with the pink we have.

More yellow... The cactus we walk by every morning. For two weeks I've been saying, "Take a picture of that cactus!" Finally:

Flowers - the flora - we see every day on our morning walks. Sharing. Sometimes I'm good that way.