Every rose has its thorn/Just like every night has its dawn

I don't claim to be any kind of flower expert, but I can recognize more than one or two.

My mom was an incredible gardener, and in my childhood she always grew zinnias, marigolds (and mariyellows, as I called the yellow ones), snapdragons, cox comb, sweet peas.

And as I mentioned in a previous post, so much of the foliage in Bali was that of my childhood. I used to pronounce frangipani "frangy-pangy"—and it wasn't that long ago that I realized that frangipani is plumeria, and we have it in the US.

It's one of my favorite flower fragrances. (Ooh, the alliteration!)

And a year ago in Bali, I spent a lot of my free time journaling and drinking tea on my porch, luxuriating in the view.

I mean, really. What a blessing!

As Bali is near the equator, darkness comes early. And every evening on my way in, I'd see the Buddha statue out of the corner of my eye, and I'd always think it was a person, and startle before I remembered.

You'd think this wouldn't happen day after day. However. 

Anyway, Fiona would often join me on my porch, and at some point we noticed these particular white flowers.

How could we not have noticed them before? We'd never seen anything like them.

They were in the middle of a bunch of foliage and some water, so not easily accessible. We didn't see them anywhere else on the extensive grounds of the hotel. None on the way to the yoga shala.

I felt lucky to have such unusual water flowers in my garden. They looked like they grew on very thin stalks. Maybe they were some kind of flowering reed?

In any case, clearly rare and tropical.

Even if we learned what they were, we couldn't take them home, as you cannot bring agricultural products into either of our countries.

But we were dying to know. We kept forgetting to ask the hotel staff about them.

We talked about these flowers so much. 

I'd seen a couple of snakes on paths near my room, so I was cautious about stepping into the foliage. But I was dying to know.

So finally, during the day, I decided I was going to tiptoe over, minding my footing and carefully stepping on rocks, to get a close-up and figure out what these were.

Thankfully, I was able to snap these photos. Because the next day, they were gone! Plucked from the garden!

Yes.

So while Indonesian bottle brushes may somehow be more exotic than American ones, I bet they're all made in China, and you can buy them at Home Depot.