Flowers of Bali

No attempt has been made to make this web encyclopedic. There are description and photographs of hundreds of flowers of Bali. The purpose of this web is to help the foreign visitor identify the flowers he is most likely to see during his stay in Bali, Indonesia.

We have traveled the byways of Bali for many years and the inclusion or omission of a particular flower for this web is based only upon whether we think the average visitor is likely to see it. We have included a number of flowering trees of foreign origin because one sees them in bloom all along the major highways.

We have omitted a number of Bali flowers that are important and useful to the Balinese simply because they are either rare or inconspicuous, or because they are abundant only in areas not likely to be visited by the average tourist.

We have also omitted most flowers which are already familiar to visitor because of their abundance in all parts of the world. There are lilies, begonias, zinnias, sunflowers, asters, roses, marigolds, and so on here, but these same flowers are common elsewhere, and thus, space is denied them in favor of flowers the visitor is not likely to have encountered previously.

We would have liked to include the Orchids. However, it is folly to speak about orchids as if they constitute a homogenous group. More than 3,000 species have been described, and it would have been impossible to speak about them in any but the most general terms.

Many visitors do not realize that tropical Bali has seasons. Bali is between eight and nine degrees south of the equator. During the months from approximately November through March, warm northwesterly winds sweep over the South China Sea and bring large amounts of rainfall to Bali.

Remember that plants are adapted to particular environments. You will only see some in the higher, cooler elevations. Others are only common to the sandy soils of the seashore. To see the majority of the flowers described here, you will have to visit places all throughout Bali.

Most hotels have lovely gardens that are full of Bali flowers. However, the emphasis in these gardens is on flowers that are long-lasting and relatively easy to care for. You are not likely to find large numbers of the flowers described in this web growing in and around tourist centers.

Whatever you needs and your point of view, we hope the articles we have provided here are interesting to you as they were to us when we first discovered them for ourselves.