Saturday, April 30, 2016

Bahamian Flowers

Hibiscus
Elder Flower
The Bahamas was in full bloom when we were there last week. Lots of flowering bushes, trees and vines like the colorful leaves of Bougainvillea. 

I think what surprised me most was that I was expecting the Bahamas to be more year-round tropical temperatures. But apparently temps do vary quite a bit and even dip into the 40s (or so our cab driver told us), but we had beautiful 70 degree weather all week.

We had arrived just as so many trees were blooming, one of which is the national flower called the Elder Flower. It looks like clusters of yellow trumpets. The flower has a number of medicinal uses ranging from digestion to high blood pressure or even catnip. I was surprised to learn that honey produced from these flowers can actually be poisonous to humans, and there must be quite a lot of it since the bees were very attracted to it. Perhaps think twice about buying Bahamian Honey!

11 comments:

  1. How gorgeous! I'm forever taking pictures of flowers and rotating them around on my desktop. Very interesting about the Elder Flower.

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  2. These are beauties! How interesting about the elder flower honey. I love the vibrant color of the hibiscus.

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  3. Beautiful flowers! And what a great trip. The Bahamas *sigh*

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  4. Oh, such beautiful colors that my eyes are craving right now! Reminds me of tropical flowers we enjoyed when we lived in St. Augustine.

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  5. Fabulous, I love those bold colors!

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  6. What gorgeous flowers! Sounds like you went at a good time!

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  7. Gorgeous! I can almost smell them! The hibiscus I know from my time in Indonesia :)

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  8. Oh wow medicinal use and yet the honey is poisonous to humans!... very interesting! Glad to hear you had a nice trip :)

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  9. Gorgeous!! I hope you had a great time! Very interesting about the honey! Good to know! Excellent that the flower has many uses for medicine! The things we can learn from mother nature!

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  10. Such beautiful flowers -and great inspiration for designing... It's always a treat to stop by your blog and learn something new. Surprising to learn honey can be poisonous to human but apparently not a problem for the bees. Where in other cases I've read the poor bees have had serious problems with farm pesticides etc. which are supposed to be fit for humans. aarg this world is full of so many contradictions!

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