Pongam or Honge or Indian Beech Tree

Pongam or Honge (Pongamia pinnata) as it's called is a native of India and grows in profusion, generally planted as avenue trees by the forest department. It's renowned for its shade and is well known in traditional uses for its medicinal properties. It is also grown as a host plant for lac insects. The tree is also one of the food plants for Common Cerulean (Jamides celeno). The seeds contain pongam oil - a red brown inedible oil - that is now being explored as an alternate fuel source. This was shot at Cubbon park.

Here are a few more pictures from Foodista


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Pink Shower Tree or Java Pink Cassia

The Java Pink Cassia or Cassia javanica is a beautiful deciduous tree with clusters of pink flowers and pods that are long and tubular. The pods contain coin-like disc shaped seeds and smells plain yucky! As the scientific name suggests the tree is a native of Java and Asian tropics. This was shot in Cubbon Park.
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Moulmein Rosewood

Millettia peguensis/ovalifolia or Moulmein Rosewood as it is called is native to Lower Burma and Siam. This is a relatively rare tree as compared to Pongam that is very similar looking, but more common in India. Pongam has white flowers while the Milletia flowers are bright pink. Pongam has more elongated tip to leaves, while this is more oval. Will try and upload complete tree and leaf images to make it easier to distinguish. This was shot in Cubbon Park.

This whole lot of pictures are processed purely using FOSS. The RAW processing was done using RawTherapee and the final image labelling and compression through ImageMagick. All on Ubuntu Feisty.
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Frangipani

One of the loveliest smelling flowers, the Frangipani (Plumeria rubra) or Temple Tree as it is known in India. These trees are more commonly found planted near a temple and hence the name. The flower is called चंपा in हिंदी and Deva kannagle in Kannada. It is more commonly recognized as the flowers that the Hawaiian dancer wear as a garland.

They are pollinated by moths in the night. Not too sure if there are any in India that pollinate it as it is a native of tropical America. This was shot at Cubbon Park.

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