Visiting Kauai - Flowers!

The flowers of Kauai are lovely. Most of the easily-seen ones are non-native. For example

Spectacular!

And since Kauai is tropical, anytime you arrive, there are flowers. Not always the same ones--some tropical plants do have annual cycles--but various and interesting flowers, all the time.

Naming the above flowers, for example as captions, seemed intrusive. 

So let me name the ones I can:  

shampoo ginger, Zingiber zerumbet, (ginger family, Zingiberaceae) from India; 

Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, Chinese hibiscus (hibiscus family, Malvaceae), from China; 

the white flower is a jasmine. It was a very fragrant shrub. However, there are a lot of species of jasmines and jasmine-relatives from all over the tropics; 

the red is Sterculia foetida, stinky sterculia (sterculia family, Sterculiaceae), from lands surrounding the Inidian Ocean; 

the plant with the pink flower, purple leaves is Tradescantia pallida (dayflower family, Commelinaceae), from Mexico; 

next is Brazilian red cloak, Megaskepasma erythrochlamys (Acanthaceae) native to northern South America and Central America; 

Catharanthus roseus, Madagascar periwinkle or vinca native to Madagascar (Apocynaceae, dogbane family);

 daylily, Hemerocallis hybrid (daylily family Xanthorrhoeaceae) native to central Asia; 

and finally

Duranta erecta, pigeonberry (vervain family, Verbenaceae) from the American tropics.

Thanks to:

Plant Finder at Missouri Botanical Garden http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/plantfinder/plantfindersearch.aspx accessed June 2014.

Pocket Guide. Hawaii Trees & Wildflowers. Waterford Press, 2009.

Zuchowski, W. Tropical Plants of Costa Rica. Cornell University Press, Ithaca,. 2007.

Kathy Keeler

More at awanderingbotanist.com

Join me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AWanderingBotanist