After going around a number of parks and took a number of pictures, I realize that besides the man made recreational facilities and playgrounds, there are much more than. There were different types of plants and trees grown in the parks. I began to realize how shadow is my knowledge of those nice flora in the parks when I tried to name those plants and flowers.
For example the Admiralty Park which is in Woodlands. To most people it is just a track with some sports facility near the Republic Poly. I have cycled around the place many times and have never noticed much about the plants and flowers. Only when I tried to write a blog then I began to take picture of flowers and plants. While writing the blog, I have a hard time knowing what is the name of the plants and flowers I took. It is virtually blank. Of the 11 pictures I took, I can only roughly comment about one - Palm tree fruit.
It is a real shame that I said I am a nature lover yet have virtually no knowledge of even the common names of the plants and flowers. As I struggle to gather information on the pictures I took, it strikes me that there are so many plant species in the world and they keep increasing as people grow hybrids of them.
One web page called "Flora Fauna Web" by NParks really helps me a lot in recognizing the plants and flowers. It is based on the book "1001 Garden Plants in Singapore" by NParks itself. From there I am able to know something about the plants and flowers I took.
The web page allows people to search for a particular species or brows through the pictures by Growth Habit or Characteristics. Browsing through all the pictures by this way is really tiring. For every picture, I may have to browse through the list at least once. Obviously, there will be times when there is no clear match between my pictures and the web pictures. I have to turn to other web pages for answer. At times I even have to look for a particular characteristic like leaves and branches of similar species to narrow it down by its common or scientific name.
Take for example the common Simpoh tree found all over Singapore. I took three pictures of it. One flower, one fruit and one spent fruit. They were taken at different time and place. They looked so unique that I though it is from three different species. After a long search, I then realize that they were from the same specie.
Google has two type of search facility for images. One is the normal search where you can search for text and then select "images" to see only images. Another search is purely by images. You can upload a picture or point to an URL to get Google to search for it (images.google.com). Unfortunately, the latter is still yet to be refined. Most often I load a flower image and it turned out with 90% non flower pictures. However, if you know the specie name of the flora, it does provide great picture lists. Just type in the specie name and you will find pictures of the specie. I have not come across one specie where there is not even a single picture.
I have created an album and put most of the pictures of the flowers and plants that I took. After which I took awful long time searching through the internet to identify them. Currently, there are just close to 100 pictures.
I have not done a trip just to find out how many species were in a particular park. It will be fun to do so. With the geotagging of the pictures, I can even tell viewers where to find the specie. It will be nice to do so while strolling around the park and be able to identify the plants around you. NParks do place a name tag on the plants but it is not very consistent.
If I go on a park stroll again, I think I will try to take more pictures of the flora so that it will make my blog more fun to read and for people to use it to look and know actual plant themselves when they visit the park.
The web link to the Picasa album is at https://picasaweb.google.com/106611639464075912591/MyFlowerAndPlantPictures#
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