Have you seen this lovely tree?

I am so pleased to have Andre Jagger back with us for another guest post on plants....

Andre, take it away..... "Walking along Castle Peak Road tracking down the components for another beautiful tree I noticed this Pink Trumpet Tree.

I've seen it before in my time in Singapore but this time is was just as magnificent but there were many of them. They can still be found flowering at the Tai Wo Interchange Roundabout on the Tsui Yiu Court side. Pay a visit and take some better pictures than mine! You may even find a bird looking for some nectar or an insect visiting the flowers.

The tree belongs to the Genus Tabebuia, there is a Yellow one in Hong Kong too and neither of them are local. Both plants come from the Neotropics, Central and South America specifically. The Pink or Rosy Trumpet tree is known as Tabebuia rosea and would easily be confused amongst the plethora of pink - magenta flowering Tabebuia species. The Hong Kong Government has developed a Greening Hong Kong programme and in its "infinite wisdom" has decided to plant an extraordinary number of trees in Parks and Gardens of Hong Kong that are not native to Hong Kong. In support of this move their claim is that many of these trees will tolerate the variable soil and climatic conditions necessary to survive. Admittedly the display of many of these trees is extremely pleasing and Tabebuia rosea is just one of them. Some light reading along these lines can be found here (https://www.greening.gov.hk/en/home/index.html , https://www.greening.gov.hk/filemanager/content/pdf/knowledge_database/map/NT8_051012.pdf, https://www.districtcouncils.gov.hk/tp/doc/2016_2019/en/committee_meetings_doc/EHWC/16997/EHW_22_2019.pdf ).

The original Genus for Tabebuia was comprehensively described by a botanist of the name, Alwyn Howard Gentry, in 1992. His work with the Bignoniaceae has been extremely well regarded and is very important. Dr. Gentry spent his entire working career at the Missouri Botanical Garden. On August 3, 1993, Gentry was on a mission in western Ecuador, when the light aircraft in which he was traveling crashed into a mountain ridge near Guayaquil. He was killed, cutting short even further work on Bignoniaceae and Tropical Forest Plants. His work is a lasting testament and greatly appreciated by many, including myself".