Can You Believe This Blossom?

These photos appeared in my inbox today. I could only find one word to describe them:

SPECTACULAR

I was so taken with the beauty of these photos of the rare parrot flower from Thailand, that I decided to find out more about them. (How did we survive before search engines?!) The longer I hunted, the more elusive information about this species seemed to become.

Then I came upon a Yahoo group comprised of a bunch of botanist groupies. Because these guys have been searching for a couple of weeks for information about this rare blossom, at least one of the writers was persuaded that the above photos were digitally altered. He sited the odd way the flowers attach to the stem as "evidence".

This jarring discovery left me wondering what I was actually admiring. I concluded that either way -- whether the Almighty Himself is responsible for these gorgeous blooms, or whether it's merely a clever individual with some nifty software -- it was creativity that I was admiring.

[I'll keep checking on this from time to time and will post my findings when I get to the bottom of the Parrot Flower Mystery...]