There would probably come a time if I spent enough months in Kauai that I cease to be fascinated by the physical beauty I can see and photograph just walking around. Here are a couple of examples from today’s trek back from the coffee shop.
This is the flower of the plumeria. I associate it with the flower leis most probably think of when thinking of Hawaii. I took almost this identical picture this morning with my phone and then came back this afternoon with my camera because I wanted an image with more pixels I might have printed. There were several trees just starting to flower and this one flower caught my attention because of the yellowish cast. It was a tough shot. I had to hold my camera over my head as far up as I could and shoot blind.
Here is the interesting thing to me about this plant. My understanding of trees and the various parts of trees suggest that in a given year, a tree opens leaves that generate the food (sugars) the tree needs through the process of photosynthesis. This sugar is used to accomplish the things a tree needs to accomplish – sustain existing structures, grow, and produce seeds of some type. The plumeria seems to accomplish all of these things, but in the wrong order. I guess this is considered winter here and the plumeria when we first arrived looked dead (for a region where everything else was green). Then a couple of leaves emerged and now the flowers. I assume the full foliage will emerge eventually. The work the tree is doing now all must be accomplished with the energy stored last season. I have no idea why this tree needs to make things so difficult.
Example 2 – note the strange coloration on this tree trunk – greens and oranges.
What is not really visible in this image is the more traditional bark that used to cover this trunk and still covers most of the rest of the tree. The tree seems to molt. I tend to think of a tree losing the bark in a complete circle of the circumference of the tree as fatal (girdling) because it exposes the cambium. This must not be what is happening in this case. This is a common tree along my path, but I have no idea what it is. It was the unusual colors that caught my attention.