There are so many beautiful plants and flowers at Singapore. Unfortunately I can not identify almost all of them. This severely limits my writing about flora at very elementary level, e.g. I could only describe flowers only by their colors.
I use image search tool, Google Lens, to help me. Google Lens is a image search tool, "it compares objects in a picture to other images, and ranks those images based on their similarity and relevance to the objects in the original picture".
For flora with distinctive features, Lens' top ranked image can match the object in my photo, e.g. a banana flower, or a white flower with 5 petals, one yellow pistil, white stamen (flower anatomy), which is Wrightia antidysenterica, or in common name snowflakes. To be sure I always do a cross validation by Google search using identified name.
 |
| Banana Flower |
 |
| Wrightia Antidysenterica (common name Snowflakes) |
There are times, when top 3 or 5 matches are very similar, especially when the sources for the matched images do not provide specific information. For example, for the following photo of plant with slender pepper, Google Lens' top match was Iboga, a cross check showed a plant with pepper shaped fruit which is very different from what is in the photo. Several lower ranked ranked images seems to match the photo better, but in non English languages or in photo storage site such as Flickr.
 |
| Orange Milkwood |
In this case, I do secondary or tertiary search based on information from Google Lens search. The best alternate is to use database specific to the location the flower is (Singapore for this case). Singapore national parks maintains a flora & fauna web - the database for plants and animals found in Singapore online. Using Google Lens information and the local database, I identified the plant as orange milkwood (Tabernaemontana aurantiaca Gaudich).
Here a few other flora photos I took on Saturday with official names identified.
 |
| Common Sendudok 野牡丹 |
 |
| Toad tree fruit |
 |
| Golden Trumpet Vine, 软枝黄蝉 |
 |
| Thalia geniculata (Alligator flag) |
 |
| Cuphea? |
 |
| Ixora |
 |
| Crepe Ginger |
No comments:
Post a Comment