Infanta has rare and beautiful flowers
In your revised, updated edition piece re rare flowers from Thailand, you correctly mentioned that we in the Philippines, especially in Infanta, have also beautiful rare flowers. For example, the Ilang-Ilang, the sanggumay, orchids (called dapong tigre), waling-waling, sampaguita, kampupot, etc.,
Several years ago, I visited a brother (Ismael) of the Villenos who opted to stay behind in Infanta (Brgy Langgas) instead of joining his other successful brothers in the States. Mr. Villeno has a mini-botanical garden and his flowering plants are beautiful sight to behold. He told me that people from Manila used to visit him in Langgas to buy flowering plants for planting in flower pots.
Aside from his mini-botanical garden, he has an orchard planted with fruit-bearing trees such as lukban, oranges, kalamansi, santol, etc. and several heads of cattle grazing under the coconut trees. Aside from cattle, he has a piggery and chicken house or coop. for native chickens.
I hope many of our kababayans would follow Mr. Villeno´s example in mini-farming described above. And planting flowering plants could be a good start. I suggested to Mr. Villeno to include in his botanical garden Philippine medicinal plants such as "balanoy," "sampaga Maria," "takig-suso," "takip-pagong", "tala-taladuan," "tubang-Silangan," Banaba, etc. all of these medicinal plants grow wild in Intanta´s rural areas. And to his orchard, to include "parisukit", "amayet," "limuran," "bokinggan", and of course, "lipote" and "katmon."