Flowers and Fruits at MacRitchie

Today I am back again at MacRitchie to catch a walk conducted by Dr Yap from NSS. Unfortunately, I made a mistake of where the meeting point was and my friends and we had to walk a long distance till the end of the boardwalk to meet the group.

Should I say that it was actually a blessing in disguise? Or else we would have missed so much flowering and fruiting plants.

The flowers,

and fruits of this climber, Ampelocissus elegans.

This curious looking structure is the flower of the Streblus elongatus, also known as the Tampines tree. Yup, the Tampines estate is named after this plant.

Flower of the Tiup Tiup, Adinandra dumosa.

The flowers,

and fruits of the Sliverback tree, Rhodamnia cinerea.

Flower buds of Porterandia anisophylla. Hopefully I can catch its bloom.

Flowers of the Bat’s Laurel, Prunus polystachyus.

Can you see the dried flowers of the Great-leafed Pin-flower Tree, Glochidion superbum? Rather apt name eh?

A fruit from this Apocynaceae climber, Willughbeia species!

Aquatic plants are another realm for me. Can anyone help to ID this pretty plant with pink flowers? Update> Mayaca fluviatilis, Thanks to Ron and Hexazona for the help.

Caught a photo of this sad looking female long-tailed macaque… I wonder what happen to it :(

Fruits of a common herb, Oldenlandia cristata.

Young fruits of the Twenty Men Tree, Ixonanthes icosandra.

And lastly, the yellow bushy inflorescence of a legume climber Entada spiralis.

Certainty worth to come back here again, to see the flowers fruit, the unripe fruits ripe, and the ripe fruits, hmm, stay there till I’m here for another look. :)

Mistletoes and some weird and nice sights

Time for some random but what I thought are interesting plants which I encountered recently.

This is a newly germinated seedling of a common mistletoe, Macrosolen cocohinensis on a wild Cinnamon plant, Cinnamonum iners. The mistletoe is a hemiparasite, meaning that the sucker which is attached to the host will grow its haustoria (its ‘roots’) into the plant and obtained its nutrients from there. It is only partially parasitic (hence ‘hemi’), since it can still make food from its green leaves.

Here is another Macrosolen cochinchinensis, but this time on a starfruit tree.

You can see its trailing suckers. Another very common mistletoe that we can find in our urban environment is Dendrophthoe pentandra. That species one have pink instead of yellow flowers, and more irregularly shaped leaves.

This Syzygium aqueum or Water Apple tree was infested by the Pagoda bagworm moth. This bagworm eats by cutting circles on the leaves, thus making the leaves of this plant seemed to be ‘hole-punched’ many times.

Another Syzygium, this time S. polyanthum are flowering! Looks quite impressive when I stood under the tree and glance up at this sea of small white pom-pom like flowers.

And finally, this was what fascinates me most~ Yellowish white sap seems to be oozing out from this big Khaya grandifoliola tree. However, this has already solidified into hard resin. Quite cool~

Dipterocarp walk at MacRitchie Part 2

In this 2nd post of last Sunday’s walk, let me just recap back to the beginning about it, since I had left that out in my 1st post.

Organised by the Plant Group of NSS, I joined this walk in keen anticipation to learn more plants. Primary forest flora are definitely not my forte, so its great that this walk came along.

The crowd was much more than what I expected, but then this was the 1st plant walk I attended.

And I guess it is also because of Dr Shawn Lum’s undeniable charm.

After a brief introduction about some of the dipterocarp genera that we can see today, we headed into Lornie Trail.

The first species we saw was this Anisoptera megistocarpa. He mentioned that the secondary veins of this genus are looped at the margins, evident from the picture below.

Just for interest, the common name of this species is Mersawa merah.

The second dip we were introduced to was the Keruing gombang merah, or Dipterocarpus kunstleri. This genus have leaves that are wavy are the margins and bears some resemblance to a piece of corrugated cardboard.

He told us the sad story of an adult Dipterocarpus kunstleri which died. However, its presence is still marked its many small baby trees like the two above.

I had heard about the big stipules of Dips but I never knew they were this large! I believed that this one belonged to Dipterocarpus kunstleri. We can see them scattered throughout the forest floor around the tree.

Shorea species have a twisted petiole compared to the other dips. The one above shows Shorea ovalis, a member of the Red Meranti group. It is rough on the underside.

Managed to take a picture of the tree.

And branches.

This leaf belonged to Shorea macroptera, the underside of this is smooth and seems to have a distinct in-rolling along the margins.

This is Shorea pauciflora. Note the twisted petiole in all the 3 Shorea species.

The large trunk of Shorea pauciflora marks the end of our walk. I had missed out three species as I had no good photos of. Will do that another time when I come here another day.

It was really a nice morning walk with new knowledge gained. Luckily I was not that lazy that day to wake up early!

I have blogged about most of the species learnt during this walk in the total vascular of Singapore online, so that you may have a quick and easy search in case anyone need to refer. :)