Nerium Oleander is both beautiful and toxic!

It's almost synonymous with 'The Beauty and the Beast' with its two distintive features!



Just admire them! Aren’t they gorgeous? We added this beautiful plant to our garden late September, 2006 and by the third week it delighted us so with such glorious bi-coloured blooms of deep pink and white. I love it so much that I wrote an article about it in another blog of mine, just to capture all its beauty and note down some important oleander plant facts and culture!



However, blooms withered in less than a month and plant by early November had reached a height of about 5 feet and looked awfully leggy! I decided that it seriously needed a drastic crop! If left to grow unattended, it'll soon be top-heavy and I'm definitely convinced that the slightest strong wind will bring it down as its container will be too small to steady it!

Thus, one early November evening, armed with my prunning shears and with one last adoring look at our Nerium Oleander 'Pink', I went reluctantly 'chopping' from the top downwards, leaving behind only an eight inch stump! Prunning is a task that I dislike most, more so if the plant looks so promising and still radiant with its lush leaves! But what has to be done must be done!

You won't believe it - in less than an hour after that prunning task, my right palm started itching and showed little signs of skin allergy! Why right and not left, you'd wonder! Hehe...you're correct...I'm left-handed and the beast in the Oleander has left its mark and tainted my right palm with its toxicity! By next morning, the allergy rash had spread to both my right and left palms/fingers!

Eeeeek!! Aaaargh!! Ouch!! The itch was unbearable, so my beloved hubby took me to see our family doctor for consultation/medication! I was prescribed Clorphenamine maleate (piriton) tablets, Betnovate Cream and Potassium Permanganate, though it took almost 2 weeks for the rash/itch to be eliminated!

SO BEWARE, NERIUM OLEANDER IS TOXIC! WEAR GARDEN GLOVES TO AVOID CONTACT WITH ITS TOXIC MILKY SAP!

Humph! I thought this was a very good lesson learnt, yes...no? Yet again had to go through
another awful attack just 3 weeks ago (early March 2007)! A fool never learns!

February Avatar Competition!

This was my entry avatar, created for the competition organised at Moosey's gardening forum! The theme - avatars that are eye-catching, have a story to tell and that fit the personality of the forum member! Avatar size should not exceed 120 x 120 pixels and must be below 20kb

So, to join in the excitement, I put on my thinking cap, tapped in my creative juices and....woohoo!...this is it!!! Spent almost 4 hours creating and recreating, totally immersed until I was finally satisfied with its result! Such fun time really, to indulge myself like a kid and learning as I progress in this challenging 'game'!

Just like to recap here how I came about this resulting avatar!
Firstly, I rummaged through my archive of garden pics to select something suitable, focusing on these three things - colours? flowers? design? I love vibrant and bright colours, dendrobium orchids top the list of my favourite flowers (as flowers last for months!) and an arching spray of these lovely flowers can be replicated (with a slight edit) to form a favourable design.
I chose this maroonish-pink dendrobium orchid image as it was most ideal. The next step was to crop the pic into a square and reduce its size to 120 x 120 pixels! Then duplicated another 3 more images as shown below, edited slightly (flip horizontal or vertical) with intention to create an oval display of these colourful orchids! All these were done in Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Then, using Adobe Photoshop, each of the 4 images was individually selected with the rectagular marquee tool, copied, pasted and repositioned with the move tool onto the newly created canvas measuring 240 x 240 pixels. The resulting image looked joyful, like a group of happy chorus dances in our garden. But a garden isn't complete without greens and dancing must be accompanied by music! :D Thus, an image of our moss rose amongst its lovely shade of green leaves was added! And to complete the scenario, a couple of 'singing' birds were sourced and downloaded from a free website (reduced its size and edit-flip), copied and pasted into this picture mosaic!

Looked incomplete without framing! And I can't frame it as is with all the segmented layers. So, I used the rectagular marquee tool to select the mosaic as a whole, copy merged and pasted onto a new canvas with its exact size of 240 x 240 pixels. Then the usual works of photo framing were applied and lastly resized the final image to 120 x 120 pixels and kept file size within 20kb (by adjusting the jpeg image quality options) as required. That's it...all done and finished!

Ahem!! Is my avatar eye-catching? Does it tell a story? Does it reflect my personality? Hehe...you decide! :D
Seems so easy now that I've done it, but it was quite tough and challenging initially as some areas were relatively new to me! I've archived here almost all the details, just in case I may find it useful someday...I know it will, as my limited human memory fails me! :D