The ornamental flower

Kochuripana plant can be unwanted and exasperating to people, but when the flower blooms, it just looks spectacular. This water plant is from the family Pontederiaceae and the botanical/scientific name is Eichornia crassipes. This plant was originally from South America, more specifically from Brazil. But later on, it just dispersed everywhere somehow. This is a water plant and only grows at water. The root of the plant is black in color, almost looks like beard.

The flower of water hyacinth is extraordinarily beautiful. This inflorescence flower has six to seven flowers on a single axis, and each flower has six petals and the color of the five petals are from lavender to pink or light blue. Other petal is interestingly different. This one is darker in color, and yellow spot at the middle.

In Bangladesh, we always used to face difficult problems with this plant. For example, during the flood, this plant used to enter inside our paddy fields, but after the flood those remain inside the paddy field to make the life miserable for farmers.

In spite of its noxious attitude, this plant has some benefactors. In Bangladesh, we used to make compost fertilizer using this plant. Since this is widely available inside our water tanks, we can use those easily. Also some crops requires moister at the soil. Using this plant around the root of the plant we can easily achieve this. We are also using this as fuel at villages during cooking. Some people use to plant this weed at the garden for its attractive flowers.