Now some interesting facts about the flower. This is used as flower, a vegetable, a herb, a cosmetic and what not! The vegetable roselle is a hibiscus variety and is used in South India for making chutneys, pickles and even curries. Hibiscus juice is another attraction where hibiscus flowers are immersed in lemon juice and processed to get a very tasty juice concentrate!. Women use hibiscus leaves and flowers for hair-care by making a shampoo of it and this is a natural treatment for hair fall and dandruff. Just pick a handful of leaves and a few flowers and scrub on a rocky surface (usually ponds are lined with rocky plates in Kerala) with a bit of water and you get a rick, bubbling shampoo. It is no-cost and healthy too. Again petals of hibiscus are used in treatment of fever and its roots have properties which cure cough. Dieters or persons with kidney problems often take it without adding sugar for its beneficial properties and as a natural diuretic. It is made by boiling the dehydrated flowers in water; once it is boiled, it is allowed to cool and drunk with ice. So go home and make some hibiscus juice right away!
Hibiscus flowers have also other values. The red flowers are offered the Goddess of Kali and Ganesh. As kids, we used to remove the petals from the flower and then blow through the tiny openings at the base of the petal and the petal will blow up a bit like a balloon. It seems children in Philippines make bubbles with hibiscus flower and leave extraction by blowing into the solution by using hollow papaya stalks.
Now some humour also. Wearing a single hibiscus flower on only one of your ears is symbol of being a lunatic person in Kerala (India). (Normally depicted in films though I have not seen any lunatics doing this in real life). But if the wearer of the flower on a single ear is Hawaiian woman it has a different meaning. A single flower tucked behind the ear indicates that the woman is available for marriage. Interesting ...isn't it?
That is lot of information.
ReplyDeleteThey come in variety of colors
We have also hibiscus but not such a BEAUTY :)
ReplyDeleteIts realy pretty those colors,
I like red flowers ^___^
Have a great weekend !!
hi
DeleteSuch a beautiful flower! Very nice blog, will be back for sure:)
ReplyDeleteThanks Rajesh, Anya and Joo for your comments. It is true that it comes in so many colours and also as mixture of colours. Even the petal arrangements vary from one to other.
ReplyDeleteThe hibiscus is a very beautiful flower and there is a very great variety of colours. In Indonesia we had the red ones, here in the Netherlands I have blue flowers and my neighbour has white ones with a bit of red in it. Interesting to read that these flowers are used in many ways as medicine and for cosmetic purposes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing! Thanks for your visit too. How awful to lose so many coconut trees by thunderstorms. I know that we also had terrible thunderstorms in Indonesia, where I lived as a child, but I was never afraid.
hild
I am african and there, the small flowers (red or white) are dried and we make either hot or iced tea out of it. we usually add some other fruits to it along with natural perfumes. we also use the green leaves in certain dishes.we first boil them and make a tick tomatoe sauce out of it that we have with rice and fried chicken.
ReplyDeleteInteresting...
ReplyDeleteFantastic Post! Lot of information is helpful in some or the other way. Keep updating hibiscus flower
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