Little Lotus

While I was Penang recently to help my bro shift house, there was a nice little Lotus pond about 100 meters away. We were so busy doing the shifting that I didn't have any time at all to take any pictures of the lotus. What was worst is that one day we saw quite alot of the lotus flowers and some were just blooming. The next day they were all gone. We suspected that some of the neightbours might have gone to chop it off to be placed in their house or something.

However lucky for me on the last day just before leaving for KL, I managed to sneak in some time to take some pictures of the lotus.

The lotus flower or Nelumbo Nucifera has a couple of stages in its life time. The picture above is when the bud of the lotus flower had formed but hasn't open up yet.

I was lucky enough to capture this which is one of the lotus flower that was about to open up to reveal its true beauty. The picture below is also the lotus flower about to open but from a different view. You can see the distinct yellow color of the seed pod.

 

Some of the flowers are pretty huge in size and some of them are quite small like the next couple of photos.

I could be mistaken and I have sinking feeling that the 2 above photos are not actually lotus flowers althought they were in the same pond. They are much smaller then the other lotus flowers and potentially they are water lily instead of lotus. Any botanist reading by blog?

Once it fully opens up and the pretty pink leaves drop off, the seed pods turns from yellow to green.

Kinda of scary when I looked at the pictures of the seed pod. It kinda looks like alot of eyes are looking at you all at the same time. It also kinda looks like the spout of a watering can depending on your preference. 

The amazing thing about the lotus plant is that it has many uses and most of the plant can be used for something. The flowers can be used for decorations, the patels are often used as granish for indian and chinese dishes. The seeds in the seed pod are edible and more often then not they are dried and used in flower arrangements.

The roots are also edible and usually either stir fried or used to boil soup. Finally the leaves are also used by chinese people to wrap gloutinous rice and in Korea it is also dried and made into tisane which is a type of herbal tea.

Talking about the leaves, some of the leaves are huge and water proof too. Check it out...

This is the beauty of photography. I saw the nice flower, I took pictures of the nice flower and for my blog I research about the nice flower. Yea Yea I am a nerd and watch too much discovery channel. What to do? Engineer mah. :)