Tag: gardens by the bay
We visited the Gardens by the Bay in the late afternoon. Very lucky because there was a very short stretch of time where the plants were bathed in dancing light. I have always loved the interplay between light and shadow, though I am too lazy to go out of my way to capture it. :P
I have never liked the bougainvillea. It is a very common roadside plant, often in its many gaudy colours. Deep bright fuchsia horrors. I was never fond of fuchsia. And because it is by the roadside, it is inevitably dusty and tattered, sometimes dry and twiggy.
But see it in a different light, pink veins lining the delicate paper-like petals. These I quite admire.
I even wrote bad poetry for it, titled “Bougainvillae”
Had to power up my dusty OmmWriter to find the haiku within! :P Donna had one for Ku too! You should go see it on Ku’s blog at Haiku by Ku! ;)
#1, #2 Lorong Halus Bridge – gateway to the Lorong Halus Wetlands.
#3, #4 A small bridge in the World of Plants, Gardens by the Bay
#5, #6 OCBC Skywalk in Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay
Out of the set, the OCBC Skywalk in the Supertree Grove looks the most otherworldly to me. Do you agree?
But I do find that stripped out of colour, black and white images can sometimes take on an otherworldly quality.
It only requires imagination to see the Lorong Halus bridge as a structure in an alien mining terrain for example. But in real life it is but a foot bridge with steel bars that zig-zag along its overall wavy frame across the river to a wetlands park. We visited quite a while back so you can see from the bridge the construction still taking place in its environs. Previously this area was a landfill site for close to 30 years.
#3 and #4 can perhaps depict an alien forest where strange creatures lurk unseen. But perhaps I am pushing my luck with this :P
Now here’s a not so otherworldly image populated by humans :P
OCBC Skywalk (picture above, foreground) and the Marina Bay Sands SkyPark (background) – These integral connecting links between the Supertrees and the three towers of the Marina Bay Sands respectively afford birds’ eye view of the Gardens by the Bay.
Anyway, we are lucky the air quality returned to good levels in the last week so we can be out and about more carefree-ly. The Skywalk looked solid, but once I got my feet on it, I do still feel quite obvious trembling and there were times that my hands feel weak gripping my iPhone tightly, haha!
Dogs are allowed in the open areas of park land belonging to NParks, but I suspect not the Skywalk since this requires ticket admission. As required by the law, all dogs need to be leashed. We couldn’t bring Donna along yesterday since we were intending to take our parents to the Cloud Forest, one of the two domed conservatories that require ticket admission for humans only. So poor Donna had to stay at home.
We are expecting the haze to return end of the month, since Aug-Sep is typically the haze season. It is not inconceivable for the PSI to go to as high as Malaysia has experienced in the past since it’s really highly dependent on where the winds have a mind to take the haze to. So yes, if you are in Singapore, make the best out of the improved air this month!! You know what they say, make hay while the sun shines. How’s that for being optimistic! :P
Note: All photos taken with my iPhone, except for #7 which is a poor quality capture using Mr P’s Samsung Galaxy phone. So it is highly edited to death! :P So you’ll understand why it looks kind of artificial. :P Bwahahahaha!
Look.
Out the window.
A canopy of trees.
Look out the window.
An encroaching urban jungle.
Soon to engulf,
Our mish-mash foliage —
Raintrees, Angsana trees.
They tangle together.
No more.
Not here.
These trees that stand in plain sight today.
Beneath layers of foliage, lichens, parasitic ferns,
before you see the tree they cover,
the craggy bark these plants cling onto.
But in the distance,
Look.
In the heart of the urban jungle,
Conservatories, man have built.
Gardens by the Bay.
Trees from far off lands stand there.
Proud individuals in their cooled air domes.
There,
the flowers be.
Studied closely, bloom by bloom
they hang. There.
And this is what the flowers saw.
Apologies for the bit of bad pseudo-poetry.
We took my mom to see the tulip display at the Gardens by the Bay for Mother’s Day. Although my mother loves her container garden, she perhaps found it hard to appreciate flowers and plants from other continents that she is not familiar with. She was happiest when she could identify plants similar to those that she is used to. And she had greater interest in the fruit bushes found at the sidelines than the tulips and other strange flowering shrubs that would not survive our climate outside of the conservatory. But I think she had a good time.
I discovered the iPhoneography challenge sponsored by gracienobiya, Lens and Pens by Sally and watchingthephotoreels the other day via completelydisappear. All the photos on this blog are taken with my iPhone. The photos above using the iPhone camera app and the Gorillacam app. I’m not used to editing much on my iPhone though, so that would be something interesting to start exploring in future posts.
When you are planning for a country, you can’t afford to see the individual tree. I sometimes wonder what sort of forest do our country leaders envision in their heads. Just a curious interest.
Themes: Nature, From above
iPhoneography Challenge: Nature
