When I’m out and about with my camera on a trip I take a lot of picture of flowers. Don’t post them too often, but I do take them. I have a background in horticulture if you need an excuse. And please keep you puns to yourself.

Plumeria are a popular flower throughout tropical climes though the flower has different names depending on which side of the equator you’re on. Depending on the cultivar, the heady scented blossoms come in neon bright colors, as striking as their fragrant aroma. When I lived in Hawaii, having access to groves of plumeria trees, I’d snap off bunches and fill my house – an air freshener by mother nature that no manufacturer could ever compete with.

This photo is of the most common plumeria you find in Hawaii though I snapped the shot in Bangkok. It’s one of the cheapest flower leis you can buy in Hawaii and is usually the flower used in the leis that tour group operators hand out to arriving passengers. It is not as popular of a lei among locals where the flower is known as the Chinese Cemetery Plumeria or graveyard flower. Plumeria trees were commonly planted in cemeteries in the 1940s in Hawaii and that’s where it got its negative connotation. Locals in the islands make Thais look un-superstitious. When I lived in Punalu’u on the windward side of O’ahu local friends often refused to come visit at night because the area was well known to be a haunt of Night Walkers, a local form of ghost (as opposed to the night walkers in China Town around Hotel Street which are a local form of prostitute with many being a local form of ladyboy). But I digress . . .

The problem with a shot of plumeria in and by themselves is that it could have been taken anywhere in the world; there’s nothing that says Hawaii or Thailand or Bali or Tahiti or . . . you get the picture. So this one would have never made my blog. Except that there is another problem with the shot, one that I didn’t catch until just lately. Can you spot it?

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