White Flowers

I created this post, which contains mostly photos, simply to offset my previous few posts, which are long and purely text. I also want to emphasize again how easily flowers thrive here in Kulaman Plateau, due to the temperature, quality of soil, and abundance of rainfall. While I am not particularly fond of flower cultivation and anything that requires tilling dirt, I seriously wish the municipal hall would see how flowers could boost the local economy. Individual farmers could grow flowering plants and sell the blooms in the plains, while the local government should build and maintain parks to attract tourists. Just like Baguio. I assume there’s enough public land in the poblacion for a large park or two, and if it doesn’t rain for a long time, Kulaman River has enough water to keep the plants alive and blossoming.

My Mother’s Garden

The cold climate of Kulaman Plateau allows the people in it to grow almost any kind of flower. My mother is one of those people who take advantage of the opportunity. In almost every house we’ve lived (we’ve moved three or four times just within our village), she would always turn the front yard into a flower garden. Heck, even the backyard.

My mother loves working the earth. It’s her garden that she tends to first thing in the morning. She studied agricultural economics, in fact, but by some twist of fate winded up a high school principal.

I’ve never lent a hand in weeding or landscaping the garden because the remnant of my old obsessive-compulsive self hates getting my hands dirty, but whenever I go back home and bum around, some people ask me if it’s the garden I get myself busy with. I politely and truthfully answer no. In fact, I began to appreciate the flowers in our yard just recently. I would barely glance at the garden before. Now, whenever I find time in my hands, I take photos of the flowers.

Below are some of my photos. Red anthuriums occupy more than half of the garden, but I find the purple and lavender flowers more attractive, so I chose the photos of the latter.

Yum, It’s Marang Season!

Marang’s white flesh is so soft, it melts in your mouth. The seeds

inside the flesh can also be boiled and taste like peanut.

If you don’t like durian because of its smell, marang is the best alternative for you. Like durian, marang thrives well in the fertile soil and temperate climate of Mindanao. Unlike durian, however, marang smells sweet and is easy to open. You only have to pry apart the skin with your fingers.

Marang has the same size and shape as durian, but instead of having hard thorns, marang has hard brown bristles at the surface of its thick skin. The bristles are coarse but won’t hurt you. In fact, to determine if a marang is already ripe, you should push its skin. If the skin recedes, the fruit is ready to be eaten, even if it doesn’t smell yet. Inside, a marang looks like a tiny jackfruit. Only, the flesh that covers each seed is white and much softer. It melts in your mouth.

As far as I know, marang is not available in malls, especially outside Mindanao. That’s because mass production of marang is difficult. Once it has ripen, the fruit will perish in a day or two. Also, it easily gets bruised when transported.

The tree occupies a large space; it normally grows larger than the jackfruit tree. If you fill your farm with marang trees, your yield will probably be not commensurate to the land area that the trees occupy. Thus marang normally is grown just individually or in a small cluster in yards or farms. To enjoy the fruit, you have to come here in Mindanao and visit the home or farm of a friend or relative.

Fruit from our own yard. Marang’s skin is commonly brown, but the variety

that tastes the best for me is the one that stays green even when ripe.

The marang tree can grow as high as forty feet,

but its branches break easily. It starts to bear fruit

when it’s six or seven years old.

Photos of the Plateau

Tagbak grows naturally in the forests of Kulaman, but this one is planted

inside the campus of Langgal National High School

I have pretensions that this blog is different from those garbage dumps out there that feature tourist spots through repetitive photos and write-ups that skim only the surface and peppered with grammatical errors. Now it looks like I have to jump into the bandwagon. Being back here in Kulaman Plateau, I’ve been taking so many photos of nature that they’re starting to clog up my computer memory. To decongest my drives, I’m posting some of the photos in this blog.

No, I’m not turning this site into a photo blog. My photos are obviously taken by an amateur, mostly in Auto mode of my lowly yet handy Canon PowerShot A2500. (Its shots are blurry in artificial light, but for landscapes and objects in natural light, I’m satisfied with the camera’s performance.) My photo posts won’t replace my regular Monday posts; the photo posts will appear in the next few months every Friday, starting today. I’ll still try to come up with text to go along with the photos, but the text will be noticeably shorter than in my regular posts, and count my captions to have ample (even extra) information.

For this photo post, I’m featuring the plant that is locally known as tagbak. I personally find the plant enchanting even when I was still a kid. It’s the fierce, not frail, kind of beautiful. It does not ask to be tended to in a dainty pot. As a flower of the jungle, it firmly buries its roots into the ground and, with green rodlike stalks, props its large leaves and heart-shaped flowers, forming a natural throne for itself, a queen demanding to be worshipped.

I must admit that the photos in this post have been enhanced using the freeware PhotoScape. The tagbak flower in my photos is paler than it appears in person, and I had time in my hands, so I tinkered with the images. Rest assured, though, that unless stated otherwise, the photos of this blog are not digitally altered. As much as possible, I want you to see Kulaman Plateau as what it really is.

I won’t slow down your computer by dumping here all the photos I could. For every photo post, I will upload five photos only at most. Also, I’ll make sure that each photo is unique, not a photo of the same subject taken at a different angle. Wait. That’s a tall order. Let me change that: If I have to feature the same subject, I’ll use up to two photos only. Lastly, though my posts for this blog are usually written in a hurry, I’ll try to check and recheck my grammar always. Visit this site next week for the second Photo Friday.

At the tip, a stalk may have a cluster of fruit instead of a flower.

The fruit is filled with sour white seeds inside.

Tall stalks of leaves normally cradle the flowers of a tagbak plant.