A flower as vivid as its name

Some time last year, I bought a small pot of bunga telang plant from a local nursery. The plant is a creeper vine and I had intended to grow it against the rear wall of my compound which forms the boundary with my neighbour at the back. The plant had already sprouted a few flowers and I planned to let it grow a little bigger before transferring it out of the nursery pot.

However, a few months after the purchase, some of the leaves started to become pale and dry up. The plant is obviously not healthy and I started to speculate on what I was not doing right. Too much watering or too little watering? Too much fertilizer or not enough? Too much sun or too much shade? One thing I was sure was that there were no insect or bug attacks. Try as I might, the plant deteriorated and finally died. Luckily, before it died, it had already produced a few seed pods which I carefully collected and properly stored until they were mature enough to be replanted.

The seed planting exercise turned out to be quite successful and I now have a few more seedlings from the single plant which I originally obtained from the nursery. Two of the seedlings have grown well and I re-potted them to a single large pot which I later placed at the back wall as per my original intention.

A few weeks ago the plants have started to flower and thus add a spark of colour to an otherwise drab cement brick wall. The flower is vivid blue in colour with light yellow marking at its centre.

The bunga telang flower yields a natural colouring compound which is used in the cooking of nasi kerabu. Other uses of the flower include the making of a type of tea drink.

Bunga telang is known by many other names such as butterfly pea, Asian pigeonwings, bluebellvine and aparjita. But perhaps the most intriguing is its Latin name, clitoria ternatea. The scientist or botanist who first coined this name sure had a vivid imagination.

Clitoria ternatea... untranslatable to Bahasa Melayu