Following The Family slowly down a street lined with jewelry shops, I asked myself what was I doing here? Then I remembered I had my phone in my pocket, and I’d been meaning to try out its macro functions for a while. I’d found my purpose in life. Always do what your spouse needs from you.
Tag: Kathmandu
Chinese knotweed
Chinese knotweed (Persicaria chinensis) is one thing I recognize immediately. The beautiful white or light pink inflorescences grace bushes of this highly invasive weed right across India. Meeting it in Phulchowki near Kathmandu was like seeing a respected enemy in his homeground. There was a light breeze. We nodded at each other and passed on.
They are on their anemone
Grape-leaf anemone (Eriocapitella vitifolia) were growing at the edge of the path. We were coming down Phulchowki in the south of Kathmandu. I did a double take. It is a flower of the late summer. You expect to see it in August and, maybe, in September. How was it growing here in early November? Could it be something else? Not a chance. The form of the flower, the shape of the leaves, everything pointed to this one species of anemone. The seasons are topsy turvy of course, but this late a flowering!
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Dalhousie Blue Bells
Why did this flower look half familiar? I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I took photos and left the identification for later. Now when I dug it out after a whole season has passed, I realized why I had that nagging feeling. This coneflower (Strobilanthes penstemonides) is related to the Karvi and Neelakurinji which mass-flower once in many years. I’ve seen other coneflowers too, but mainly in the western ghats, but this was growing in the Himalayas.
Could the ID be wrong? I can’t rule that out without uprooting the plant. Still, everything I see fits: the shape of the flower, the anthers and stamen, the form of the leaves (highlighted in the photo above), the size of the bush and flower, and even the way it buds out. Then I remembered that a year earlier I’d seen chir pheasants eating a coneflower (Strobilanthes) at a similar height in Uttarakhand. And then there is the common name: Dalhousie blue bells. It’s a Himalayan species all right. So the ID is very likely to be correct.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Honey trap
When you go for a walk on a wooded hillside in autumn you should expect to see that many of the plants have gone to seed. This is so even if the hill is called Phulchowki, which means a custom house of flowers. Perhaps especially so. But this is a good time to notice something that you the profusion of colour of a month earlier may have hidden. Every flowering plant is an invitation to pollinators to come and help it have sex. The honey pot under the flower’s sexual organs is the payoff for the pollinator. But the cone of the flower is often also a trap for the creature. Spiders lie in wait inside the cone.
In the featured photo you can see a flower is wilting away, its job done. But a hopeful spider still lurks in its debris, with its feelers strung across the collapsing mass. The mchanics of the hunt are now laid bare: it hides high up under the sexual organs, to jump down on its prey as it burrows down for the honey pot. The hillside was the realm of jumping spiders, as you can see from the numerous tripwires spread among the plants. Which means that in the right season there will be spiderhunters here: many species of those tiny birds with long curves beaks which can grab a spider even if it retreats deep inside a flower. The web of nutrition spread wider than we could see: from under our feet where the fallen leaves were rotting away, to the sky above.
A micro-flower of Nepal
A plant that I saw growing by the road down Phulchowki looked like it was about to bud. Each bud was less than half a centimeter across. “Definitely one of the Aster family,” I thought to myself as I took the macro. Not at all, as I found when I looked at the photo. The balls were made of many, really many, tiny flowers, as you can see. Each flower is less than 100 microns long. The plant is not in the family Asteraceae. The inner flowers have begun to open up, the outer buds in each ball-like inflorescence are yet to open. My camera sees things more clearly than my eye.
I had photos of the whole plant, and you can see the shape of the deeply lobed leaves here. The leaves are a couple of centimeters long, so this photo gives you a better sense of the scale of the flowers. The branching stem reminded me of knotweed. I looked through whatever flower-finders I could find. Nothing identifies these microscopic flowers. Most guides concentrate on flowers that the human eye can see. But they are insufficient today, when a pocket-sized camera can resolve what needed a low-powered microscope earlier.
I usually set the camera on focus stacking mode when I take macros of these tiny things. As a result I caught a caterpillar perched on the branch. The little crawler was about a centimeter long, so that gives you a scale of things. I have a hard time identifying moths. Identifying the caterpillar is just impossible for me.
Autumn with bells on it
We’d decided to spend a morning climbing Phulchowki in Kathmandu while doing some birding. That was a bit of a washout. We spotted a few birds, but just a few. But the wildflower haul was terrific. When I came across these lovely bells hanging on an otherwise dry bush I was pretty sure that I would be able to identify it later. If it had been red or orange I would have immediately put it down as a species of Aeschynanthus. The dry bush was over a meter high, with an upright central stem from which branches went out at regular intervals. I couldn’t find this in a field guide, but eventually an app pointed me in the right direction: genus Isodon. It is likely to be Isodon lophanthoides, whose Nepali name is Masino chapte.
Raithaane
What you see in the photo above is a pie filled with juju dhau. The crust is made from tsampa, a flour made from roasted barley. It is a signature dish in the wonderful eatery in Kathmandu called Raithaane. We went there for lunch the day before Diwali. Unlike in an India city, when Diwali is a time of overflowing crowds in shops and restaurants, Kathmandu sleeps in Diwali. It is a private festival, and everything shuts down.
The restaurant was open for its last service in a week. A skeleton staff manned the open kitchen. Raithaane is doing sterling work in collecting old recipes from across Nepal for its kitchen. We liked what we ate and drank, and wished we’d thought of eating there a couple of times more. There’s always our next trip to look forward to.
I’m travelling in a really odd place where no network reaches. I will take a look at your posts and telegrams as soon as I’m able to.
One last time around Patan Darbar Square
In the last two weeks I’ve shown lots of photos from around Patan’s Darbar square, and written a lot about it. Here I wanted to bring together a few final photos from the place. Most of the buildings are the traditional Newar fired brick and wood constructions. The lone stone temple visible here was the Krishna temple. In the twilight the dark stone set off the warm light on the second floor where a ceremony was in progress.
One of the reasons that I’ll have to go back is so see the palace. It shuts at five, so by the time we reached, not only was the gate closed, but the last tourists had left. Patan is reputedly the oldest Buddhist city in the world. It is said to be older than Patna (Pataliputra), the erstwhile capital of Magadha, which spread the religion across Asia. I don’t know what evidence there is in support of this claim. I have time to dig a little deeper into this history before I return.
Whatever the prehistory of the settlement, the early modern temples that dot the square in front of the palace are beautiful. Among the structures restored after the 2015 earthquare is the Vishwanath temple. These two stunning wooden pieces are from there: a window on the left, a door and its lintel on the right.
Street art of Patan
We spent only one evening in Patan, but in our long and meandering walk through parts of it I noticed an unusual sort of public art. They were photorealistic grayscale paintings of birds with a coloured circle as a background. All of them had a signature: one attribution for the photo, another presumably for the painting, all by the same two people.
There were so many things to do in that one evening that I did not really tailor my walk to find more examples. The three that you see here are all I saw: the sparrow, the munia, and the kingfisher. But the next morning as our car took narrow lanes through Patan in order to beat the airport traffic, I glimpsed several more pieces in the same style. This is one thing to watch out for if I go back to Patan soon. Unfortunately street art is shortlived.
Don't hold your breath 
