Lantana is a Weed of National Significance. It is regarded as one of the worst weeds in Australia because of its invasiveness, potential for spread, and economic and environmental impacts.

Lantana forms dense, impenetrable thickets that take over native bushland and pastures on the east coast of Australia. It competes for resources with, and reduces the productivity of, pastures and forestry plantations. It adds fuel to fires, and is toxic to stock.

Whatever it is, they are beautiful and planted all over Penang’s parks, gardens and at roadside to beautify the island. I have a big library of photos of lantanas. Each flower has different colours, hues and so different.

A pink flower. It is really tiny but looks huge on macro shots.

Red and orange, such beautiful combination.

Purple – so sweet.

Lantana – such pretty flowers but with a bad reputation as a weed.

Previously, I am rather lazy in driving my children out to any place during the day due to the heat and bright sun. It is not an easy job to drag a small toddler out because of the number of things to bring along.

However, we rather enjoy outings now because I have photo opportunity while the children has the chance to play around.

This is a picture of the Penang Botanical Gardens. It has this nice, long stretch of grass path and flanked by beautiful flowers at the side. Butterflies of various colours fluttering amongst the flower is indeed an amazing sight for a toddler.

Running barefoot on the grass is certainly thrilling for my toddler. However, I am not sure why the photo looks a bit awkward. It must be my bad photography because my toddler seems to have very short legs and long body. Hahaha. I was sitting on the grass when I took this photo.

This is a tiny, purple flower. I seems to have problem with my camera White Balance. Purple colours turned out blue, meaning there is a lack of red? Anyway, I had enhanced the colour with some softwares, hence it looks artificial.

This white flower is commonly found at Malay graveyards. Therefore, there is a very spooky feel to it. I took this photo at the Penang Youth Park, far away from any graves. Hahaha. I attached a photo filter (a lense to filter out bright sunlight, enhance colours, useful for taking photos in sunny places, to cut down reflections, enhance blue skys, yadda, yadda) earlier and the sky turned dark as a storm was coming.

So, what I get is this shot of the white flower with nice shadows. It does look spooky, right? Let me share a spooky tale with you.

Once, a janitor from a private hospital told me this ‘real and true story’. Long time ago, before the hospital has an incinerator (to burn things), they used to bury parts of the body, e.g. amputated legs, parts taken out from operations and also dead fetuses (i.e. those babies born/aborted/miscarried before time) at the backyard. Over there, they have this plant with white flowers. The janitor told me that whoever dare to bring a single bloom home will have their nights disturbed. This is because the flowers ‘belong’ to these ‘things’ that are buried in the plot. She challenged me to try and even pointed out the plant. Scary?

Well, don’t be. When I was small, i.e. during the 70s before the invention of computer and electronic games, we used to play with these flowers. It was the favourite game for primary school girls. We would pick these flowers, from a graveyard near my primary school. Tied them into a bunch and kick them. The game is to see how many times you can kick (sorry can’t think of an appropriate word to replace ‘kick’) with one foot and balance on the other, and keep the bunch of flowers from falling onto the ground. A little like sepak raga.

And nope, nothing disturbed me eventhough I took a whole bunch from the graveyard.

I hope you enjoyed the little spooky tale and also like these two photos which seem to look prettier with the shadows.

Added : Thanks to all the commentors especially torment and Lrong, I just learnt a new word. Frangipani or Plumeria is the name of the spooky white flower. There are even webbsites dedicated to this flowers! Amazing what I learnt from blogging.
The Plumeria Place
Virtual International Plumeria Society

Meantime, I snapped some photos when my children were at the Penang Botanical Gardens. There are things that seem to look nicer when you captured them close-up and enlarge in huge size.

My Konica camera enable me to take nice macro shots. Almost every photographers would have taken photograph of subjects like the spider web. I had cropped the photo, purposely adjust the contrast and brightness to make the intricate web design stands out.

Next subject that most people like taking is buds and young shoots. Young shoot of plant gives that fresh look. I purposely scooped some water from a fountain and splash on the shoot to create the dew drop effect.

My children were delighted to find a little squirrel scurrying past their feet. Little toddler exclaimed, “Mama, look! Rat!” The squirrel bravely went to a man who was sitting on the bench munching potato crisps. I use the zoom to capture this photo. It has been a long time since I last saw a squirrel that lives in the wild. All the time, I saw them at the zoo.

Such a nice walk in the park today.

I have a lot of photos of flowers. Here is a big bunch of pink and red ginger flowers. The ginger family which comprises the galangal, ginger, bunga kantan (the flower for laksa) and other species produce unique shape flowers. This flower is very hardy and beautiful in flowers arrangements.

These are photos I took during the Penang International Floral Festival which ended yesterday.

Below is a photo of orchid. Orchid is also another type of flower which comes in all kind of forms, shapes and colours. Malaysia has many rare species of rare orchid not found anywhere else in the world.

These photos are taken with my very old camera, Canon A10. Surprisingly, this camera produces rather nice photos, considering that I had given the camera to my toddler to play around the house, like a toy. A hardy camera indeed!

The below is a photo of gerbera. I love gerbera for it’s ‘artificial’ look. Gerberas are often used in flowers arrangement too because it looks really pretty in many shades of colours. I am not sure what those berries-like plants are. I like this photo for the different focus, of blur and sharp objects.

I realised that to take great photos, one does not really need a very advance camera. It lies more in the composition of the objects, angles, combination of colours and most of all, a deep interest in photography. The fact that I can snapped these photos with a camera that is already out of production, only 1.3MP and several years old is proof.

*still waiting patiently for my Konica camera to return from the repair shop*