Butterfly Ginger

Our niece is coming over to stay with us for 3 weeks. We have a belief in our family that the best welcome you can give is to welcome friends and families to a clean house. I was just getting started in sorting out the guest bedroom when our top loading washer died in mid-cycle. So I was having a mini domestic crisis last week and have to delay posting till today.

You know they say that you can trace some of your adult behaviour back to your childhood. I think it was around the time of this picture was taken (I am the one on the right) my mother fenced off a small area of land for me to use as a little garden and my auntie taught me how to cast on and to knit. I grew all sorts of plants in my little plot: ginger, mint, lilies… what I remembered most was the scent of the plants and the perfumes from the flowers.

So when we moved to Florida and live in a house with a big yard, I wanted to grow ginger. The sub-tropical weather here often reminds me of Hong Kong.

I planted these butterfly ginger about two years ago, they flower for the first time…so pretty and the scent so beautiful. The flower shapes like a butterfly too.