Advertisement
Then & Now | Bright side of life reflected in charming resilience of the kapok tree
Bad times come and go, but the kapok blossoms and koel bird songs – a striking staple of Hong Kong in spring – remain
Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
Native to tropical Asia, Bombax ceiba, commonly known as kapok, is now so widespread locally that some mistakenly consider the species endemic. One of Hong Kong’s greatest annual pleasures is their sudden, short-lived burst of showy red or orange flowers. For a few short weeks, these appear everywhere from Aberdeen to Yuen Long, concurrent with early morning and late afternoon koel bird calls. Everyone has their preferred viewpoints; mine remain close to home at Shek Kong.
Five years ago this March, the world slammed shut as Covid-19 spread across the globe. Hong Kong closed its borders and turned inward. In the three years that followed, international movement remained possible – at great inconvenience – for those with the time and financial resources to endure lengthy quarantine confinement. For everyone else, travel became impossible; even spontaneous day trips to Macau, simple journeys that only months earlier were too unremarkable for comment, became wistfully remembered fragments of a life that had ceased to exist.
As the pandemic years trudged on, personal routines and private rituals became a smudged procession of carefully mimed charades of normality. For those penned up here, Life’s clocks stopped, kept weird and irregular hours, or chimed at the wrong time, if at all.
Hong Kong’s pandemic-era half-life traipsed on for three years. But throughout that wretched time, every March, right across Hong Kong, the venerable kapoks still burst forth into magnificent display. In the old British military quarters along the lower stretch of Route Twisk, People’s Liberation Army soldiers had long ago replaced Gurkhas. But these trees had gone nowhere when times had changed. Once a year, as always, they brought forth their flowers. And just before dawn, at kapok time, the first plaintive koel – little heard through the rest of the year – began its hauntingly distinctive, onomatopoeic cry.
And at least in Hong Kong, we weren’t locked down inside for interminable weeks. Carefully counting one’s allotted blessings became essential to sanity.
An afternoon’s walk at Shek Kong at kapok time was still bright with every shade of deep red and bright orange – even if mandatory face masks rendered impossible a nature ramble’s sudden, unexpected scented pleasures. Early morning and late afternoon, this gardener went out, buckets in hand, to gather up freshly fallen, fleshy kapok flowers from the roadsides to add to the compost pile, excellent fertiliser, free for the taking, and far too good to waste.
Advertisement