Mother's Day #2: Foster Garden Corpse Flower

Let's face it. We never celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day on the correct day because we like to avoid crowds.  We usually celebrate the day before or after. Same with this Mother's Day.

Dennis and his family took Mom out for a special Mother's Day luncheon on Sunday. We decided to take her for an outing on Tuesday because we heard on the news that the corpse flower at Foster Gardens was blooming.

The first tree we saw was a giant Bo tree. We always called it the Bodhi tree. This tree is supposed to be a descendant of the tree that the Buddha was sitting under when he was enlightened.

The Quipo was huuuuuge! The soft wood (similar to Balsa) is used in Panama for rafts and canoes.

The Panama Flame tree had these odd flowers growing right out of the trunk.

Alongside the Quipo, the Mocora Palm caught my eye. The trunk would make it hard for anybody to climb.

The Sausage tree has flowers that bloom at night. Baboons, and giraffes like to eat the "sausages."

The Loulu is the only palm native to Hawaii. Coconuts were brought here by Polynesians. This Loulu is over 100 years old.

I always like to visit the Cannonball tree. The flowers and fruits sprout right from the trunk. That's not a separate vine growing on the tree; it's part of the tree. We made sure not to stand under the tree for long since there were lots of cannonballs overhead ready to fall. The flowers were strikingly beautiful.

Heading toward the palm collection area we saw this Double Coconut tree. You can see what the coconut fruit looks like in the insert that was at the reception desk. It's different from the regular palm trees we see in Hawaii.

There were 23 different species of palm trees in this area. Art couldn't resist picking up a palm fruit to smell and show Mom. Ummmm.... Saw this sign later. That's OK, he's alright.

The Kapok tree was impressive! You can see us standing at the base of the tree. Apparently the silky fibers in the seedpod used to be stuffed into life preservers.

I'm always fascinated by the giant Baobab tree. The Baobab provides nectar for bats, fruit for baboons, leaves for giraffes, and bark for elephants. This Baobab was probably planted in 1940.

It was pretty awesome to look up into the Silk-Cotton tree.

I was going to just rely on the iPhone for photos, but it was a good thing I brought my bigger Canon camera. We wondered why this tree was called a Shaving-Brush tree. I took a telephoto shot up into the tree and saw why. It does look like a shaving brush, don't you think? Younger guys probably wouldn't know what that is.

We finally headed over to the orchid house to see the Corpse flower. Doggone it!!! It was NOT blooming yet. The docent said it would bloom after lunch and should be fully bloomed at 4:00. That's when Foster Garden closes.

We saw the Corpse flower in Chicago last year. The Chicago Botanic Garden kept the place open 24 hours while it was blooming. It also gave updates on their website along with a webcam showing the progress. Good grief! They even gave their corpse flower a name. The first was Spike. The second flower was Alice.

There was no way we were going to wait for the Foster Garden flower to bloom. After two and a half hours of walking, we were tired and hungry.

We headed out to Mom's favorite restaurant, Gyotaku and she had her favorite dish, the Gyotaku Lunch Box.

Then we went home and took a nap.

So that was Mother's Day #2.