Cambodia: Flowers, Flowers, Flowers

As one might expect, Cambodia is home to many kinds of flowering plants! It does have a tropical climate and lies not far from the equator in S.E. Asia.

It is thus home to many kinds of flowering trees, some of them wild, some that have been domesticated.

This blog is dedicated to documenting the trees that I have encountered in Cambodia with words and as many pictures as this software allows!

My focus will primarily be on the wild-flowering trees, but I am sure to stray, as there are domesticated varieties worth showing.

The flowering trees pictured in this post are locally known as Daem Leung Reach. Daem means tree. Cambodians do not use a tree's name without indicating that it is the tree that they are talking about, and not, for example, the fruit or the leaf! Leung means yellow, and Reach may be best translated as royal. So the Royal Yellow Tree.

This tree is domesticated, but I have found it growing wild in Ratanakiri, but maybe those were trees that escaped domestication! The tree is very loose limbed and not often symmetrically organized. Often, when it does bloom, the blooms do not fill the entire tree and a loose, gangly, lopsided kind of look emerges. But ... when the tree has good form, when its blooms fill the body, there probably is no flowering tree more beautiful.

The Leung Reach (called the Golden Shower Tree in English references) is very popular in Thailand because the color is the color of their beloved King.

In Cambodia it can be found in the larger cities planted as an ornamental tree along streets (it is not much of a shade tree), but it is out-numbered by many other kinds of flowering trees.

A small number of older, very beautiful Leung Reach trees grow in the corner of the public park in front of Wat Botum, down from the National Assembly.