Endemic Plant Pandakaki

A plant with white small flowers, scattered in our fallowed areas or in little thickets under coconut trees are these shrubs we locally call pandakaki, Tabernaemontana pandacaqui. It is native to the Philippines and other neighboring Asian countries. It is very resistant to drought that we can see them leafless during dry seasons, but eventually grow again with the coming rainy months. I observed that in drier patches they do not grow as tall as this picture, some are just about a foot tall. The stems specially the base of the plant are strong and cannot just be cut or pulled off by hands. We have a lot of this plants in our area and around the surrounding localities. It is reported to be common in Asia, and the Pacific Islands including Australia.

The flowers are white with a bit wavy petals. They do not open simultaneously in big clusters unlike the umbels of some plants in the Apocynaceae family. 

 Flowers are just a little over 1 centimeter in diameter, but they are cute, don't you think so?

It looks like a spinning wheel, and it is loved also by some butterflies.

 The fruits are technically called follicles, and normally emerge as a pair like above. They start as green which changes color as it ripens.

color already turning orange

The follicles eventually become orange as they ripen. 

The black seeds are enclosed in red pulps, seemingly very attractive to eat. These pictures are just as i see them in the wild normal habitat. With those lots of seeds inside a folicle, i can imagine why there are lots of plants i see all around our area in the province. 

Extracts of all parts of the pandacaqui plant is reported to have alkaloids and triterpenoids. It is also known to have medicinal properties. The internet is full of reports on its uses and concoctions and plants are being sold online. 

In my area, i haven't known any use for medicinal purposes, but it is commonly used as landscape materials. It is not very difficult to grow and very tolerant to drought, which probably made it good in ornamental industry. I also observed it to be good nectar plants for some butterfy species, so it can be both used in landscaping and in butterfly gardening. 

Nature Notes

Our World Tuesday

Floral Friday Fotos

Million Babies

One early Sunday morning i was out after coffee, donned with my normal jogging pants, long sleeves and a hat. I am expecting to see a lot of butterflies. I purposely intend to go to my so called "butterfly sanctuary" i term i give to an area under some trees where the undergrowths consist of both hosts and nectaring plants for butterfly. For the many visits i've been going there, it did not fail me. Many butterflies converge there, and also maybe the already very tall trees give the butterflies the environment both not fully exposed to the sun and the enough humidity for them to live nicely. 

However, this time my time was spent differently. I noticed that the area's vegetation are already in the mature stage, maybe not anymore good hosts for the caterpillars. So i took photos of some moths and beetles that i normally ignore when butterflies abound. This morning the primary purpose is not there so i took photos of whatever took my fancy. Even the dried grass fruits ready for wind dispatch are good photo subjects. 

Then i found this! I was a bit scared as they are very plenty, newly hatched baby spiders. Maybe they are hundreds of thousands in one group. I thought they might just have newly emerged. I can't even see the egg sacs they emerged from. 

 undisturbed yet

I watched closely at the somehow not moving spiderlings, just hanging on those almost invisible fine webs. I can't even see their mother even outside the community.

After getting a few pictures i tried disturbing the web with some little movements. 

Everybody moved downwards sliding on the web threads attached to the base of the plant they are in. Can you see the fine threads sparkling with the morning sunlight? They seem to be very strong, swirling pliantly with the wind. 

There they go, everybody's instinct is to come down for safety, maybe to hide on the ground. They can sense that their present predator is big maybe because of the strong movement of their web-house. Others just fell, maybe purposely or maybe they just slipped from the web, i don't know! The drama continues and i was so curious with my little experiment. 

After a few minutes, and after i am done with my photos i stopped moving the branch they are in. Just a few seconds of silence and they immediately rushed upwards again to their big original community. I just am not sure what happens to those that fell to the ground, i hope they can still come up to their safety again. Their pace is so fast, in a few seconds they are already up there again. The only signal or communication they have is the movement of their web and the branch the web is clinging. 

Spiderlings are hatched with that plenty of numbers because their predators are plenty, and a lot of them die while at their spiderling-hood stage. The number is nature's way of preserving the species through the few that will survive its harsh environment. I just did not have the time to observe more for their other characteristics as a group, nor to watch for any predator that might come here. Or probably with my presence for a few minutes, they were spared by the predators who are also scared of me. I went there again 2 weeks after, they were not there anymore. I hope that means they are already independent making their own lives, away from their spider siblings! 

Camera Critters

Nature Notes

Our World Tuesday

Garden Bloggers Bloom Day for July

Our Rainy Season started in June this year. So our plants this July are already very happy, everything sprouting from rain saturation. I went home some weekends specifically to catch the blooms and to post them here for GBBD. More plants start to show their growth, blooming happily with their plenty of food uptake. And the photographer, in return, is happily documenting their conditions as well. These are just some of the more obviously conspicuous blooms resulting from the heavy rains.

 the sleeping shoots were shaken from slumber and produced blooms.

 The lilies were terminated off their dormancy, like this Scadoxus multiflorus or Blood Lily. We don't see them during the dry season, as their leaves are gone with only their live bulbs in the soil. With the first heavy rains they regain growth, all the flowers sprout first before the leaves. They sprouted a bit staggeredly, so we can see the red umbels for at least 2 weeks.

 I also observed that the stingless bees swarm on them with their legs full of pollen to be brought to their hives. In a month the umbels will die and be replaced with green leaves, again accumulating food to prepare for their next dormancy in the dry season.

 Crinum jagus

Crinum zeylanicum

Pteroceras ungiculatum (orchid)

This is an endemic orchid in the country. It has been there hanging on the trunks of my trees, self-supporting, a bit dying during the dry season but suddenly comes to life with blooms when the rains come. It also produces a lot of pods. 

Mussaenda Dona Luz

Those colorful parts are bracts, enclosing the small yellow flowers. We cut all those branches 2x a year when those bracts wither. The succeeding shoots will enable the tree to accumulate food again for the next flowering, which coincides just after the first heavy rains. 

Clausena sp. 

This small tree belongs to the Rutaceae which include the citrus. Flowers entice a lot of butterflies there on top. It is called "malarayap" in the our local term because the leaves emit a scent like that of "dayap" or our local lime. 

Tabernaemontana pandacaqui (pandakaki)

This is a bush which luxuriantly grows in our areas, fallowed lands, under coconut trees, vacant or marginal lands,  everywhere in our vicinity. The butterflies also love nectaring on them. It produces very colorful orange pods when ripe that can be easily seen from a distant, in contrast with the green environment. 

Hoya lacunosa 

Hoya lacunosa is one of the small-leaves hoya, with equally small umbels. But its overpowering scent makes up for the size of the flowers. After the heavy rains it produced a lot of umbels. The above plant alone has 15 umbels. 

Hoya lacunosa 

Hoya obscura

This plant is also considered small because of the leaves, but it is a bit bigger than H. lacunosa. Even just the lacunosa or the obscura flowers alone are open, one can immediately realize that a hoya is in bloom in the hoya enclosure. The scent is easily discernible at 5 meter radius or 10 m diameter. 

Pseudorhipsalis ramulosa (syn. Disocactus ramulosus) 

This is a red-leafed hanging cactus whose fruits are so small at less than a centimeter in diameter, changing color from green to white as they mature. Every notch on the leaves produce flowers that eventually become fruits. 

Even the fungi are happy emerging with the start of the rainy season as the brown fungus above and the yellow ones below. I do not know their identification.

It is my first time to upload a video in my posts here, but i cannot control sharing with you the happiness of those bees nectaring on the newly opening Hoya alwitriana. This hoya is so much different than most because it opens in the morning, when the bees and other insects are starting to forage for nectar and pollen. Most hoyas open late in the afternoon to early evening. This scene above always happen when an umbel opens but the bees leave after a few minutes.

It is so nice to watch something like this in nature, and the bees do not seem to mind a human watching them. Those honey bees are also endemic in the country, Apis cerana. Their honey is my most prefered honey among the honey producing bees.

Floral Friday Fotos

GBBD
Our World Tuesday

Bits and Pieces in my World

As i write this, our rainy days have not  stopped since last weekend. Rainy season has arrived finally! Our heat subsided, hopefully our electric bills as well. It started with a thunderstorm, followed by a typhoon that already left, but there is still a strong pull of Southeast Moonsoon rains giving us floodings in some areas and of course No Classes in all levels. The last one is much awaited by students, young and old. Government employees also share in the rainy-day-holidays because work was declared half day last Monday. Then of course yesterday is our INDEPENDENCE DAY! Many believe we don't really have a TRUE independence, but we wallowed in "holiday". I cannot just go home to the province to attend to my plants, but i had some extra time to clean the house and do the laundry. And of course, i had more time editing my pictures, blogging and in FB. Haha, it is a real holiday.

Sanzevieria trifasciata blooms last dry season, with full sweet scent at night.

Spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum, grows well when fertilized. This just started from a very small plantlet like those at the end of the long stems. Now it has a lot of plantlets ready to be an independent plant. 

A volunteer eggplant i nurtured well with fertilizers, and has already given me the first fruit. Those two fruits will in turn be for my sister and mother who water it daily during the very dry months. I hope it will grow even better now during the rainy season. 

that is the first fruit which i ate with relish, excitement and thankfulness

a moth larva is trying to get a share, but i saw it before it was able to bite

These are guavas i found in the thicket, fallowed areas when i was looking for butterflies. Eaten early morning, it gave me a full doze of Vitamin C requirement and tummy full too. It gave me power in chasing butterflies in the wild to photograph.

And to complete the story of my day, let me show you our new young kittens, which do not stop at all from running, teasing each other, pulling each other's tail and everything. Look at that, they were just stopped by my camera. 

Nature Notes

Our World Tuesday