Karen the plant geek explores the Orchid Company and Rose Garden

We're having trouble posting photos so we are emailing them home to be posted from the US. Thanks Craig!

Here is one good picture from the night cruise. It is nice to see the wats from the river rather than from the city / street side.

It was great to visit the Thai Orchids Company because we were able to walk through the landscaped grounds with a plant lover. Many of the plants that are grown throughout Bangkok and our roadtrips were featured in the garden. We saw Bismarkia palm, Allamanda and a cool vine with aerial roots that were trimmed to look like bangs. We were also able to see the production end of Orchid growing from micropropagation, orchid cross test beds and foliage plant production of many cultivars that I’ve never seen. We have photos of everything but I’ll share a few photos below. The coolest plants I saw were a small Syngonium (tiny), crinkle leaved Ixora, fun new Aglaonema, orchids I’ve never seen, grafted Euphorbia lactea, all sorts of colors of Adenium, and Ficus that were foreign to me (new leaf shapes, sizes and variegation patterns).
















Vine with aerial roots
















Bismarkia palm
















Crinkle leaved Ixora













Syngonium












Aglaonema

At the Rose Garden there were large scale displays of Orchids. Vanda orchids were planted all along this hillside. In the patio area, they were used as groundcover below palm trees. In the parking lot Orchids were grown on trees (2 needle Pine) and the trees lined the drive, almost like parking lot islands. If you look closely you'll see that the orchids are planted in coconut shells and the shells are just kind of arranged on the surface of the soil.
















Vanda orchids groundcover
















Parking lot orchids


Also at the Rose Garden we saw Petrea vine, Cockroach berry Solanum aculeatissimum, which looks like a jumbo green pea, Citrus hysterix – Kaffir Lime, Mango tree and Papaya trees and Bouganvilla everywhere.
















Papaya trees


General thoughts and observations:
English is on nearly all signs inside Bangkok and nearly none of the signs in the outlying areas. At one point we thought about obtaining an international drivers license but now we see just how ridiculous that would have been. The traffic is horrible. We’ve been lucky enough to have private drivers for 2 days. It is nice to sit in a roomy, air conditioned van and eat snacks. Looking around, everyone else is crammed into the backs of pickup trucks, crammed into small Toyota cars, or piled 3 deep on a scooter.

In all of our readings we learned that the King is revered. Everyone speaks highly of the King and his family. I didn’t expect to see pictures of the King everywhere, the bigger the better. Just about every traffic intersection and large business has a life size or larger photo of the king. The King’s birthday is on December 5 and we’ve found out that the country will come to a halt on that day. Workers have begun to put up decorations in celebration of his birthday. KD