Nature is a World of Reality and Fantasy.

 Nature is a World of Reality and Fantasy.

Paintings and Verses by Dr Abe V Rotor

1. Ode to a Stream on the Wall

Markus 1 (in stroller), with friends at home in Lagro QC, 2016

Flow gently, sweetly with the breeze

     and sing with the little children;

whisper with the rocks and trees,

     make every creature their friend.

Sing the songs of the forest deities,

     the cheerful crickets and birds,

lullaby of Mozart, chorus of Liszt:

    "Grow and be happy,” they urge.

 "I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles." - - Anne Frank

                                  2. Mackie and the Owl

Until I captured the scary creature

     with paint brush on the wall,

where kids could talk to and touch;

     now the owl is a friend to all.

Mackie poses before a wall mural painted by the 

author at her home in Lagro QC 2015

Mackie used to be afraid of the owl,

     imagined or on the screen.

and would fling into embrace blind

     until it is no longer seen.

The creature would appear in the dark,

     in her favorite cartoon;

by its hooting in the hollow of a tree,

     she would freeze like stone.

Until I captured the scary creature

     with paint brush on the wall,

where kids could talk to and touch; 

     now the owl is a friend to all. ~

3. The World in his Paint Brush

Markus 2 author's grandson paints a mural 2015, QC

"Freedom in imagination, young as he is, while grownups yearn for expression outside the confines of art; who is the master then? Yet, the path that he takes is rough and uncertain, sans model and determination he'll miss his aim."

 - A V Rotor

"Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality." - Oscar Wilde

           4. "Nature is a world of reality and fantasy."- avr

Wish the animals are alive and tame.  Author's Residence Lagro QC

 

They never saw the animals in the wild;

no, not in the concrete jungle of the city;

save a visit to the zoo, images on TV,

it's a world of reality and fantasy.

"There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter." - Rachel Carson

A Day with the Elephant - Beauty and the Beast

            A Day with the Elephant -  Beauty and the Beast

Photos by Dr Abe V Rotor

First, you have to befriend the elephant's master.

Get to know a baby elephant.

Then get to know an adult one.

Before you climb and sit on the saddle and feel like a princess.

Now you can go places - with the beast's master.

Riding an elephant makes two faces. Actually, three.

Young elephant needs company, and vice versa,
under the watchful eye of the mother.

"If you tame me, you are responsible to me. "
(From The Little Prince) That's the key to friendship.

Befriend the parent, too. The family circle, in fact.

Hurray! Freedom to both of you.
Freedom is the prize of friendship.

Now you can go places - to the home of the beast, the jungle.

And to your own - the complex human habitation.

At the end, friendship is sealed with a real kiss.
And the memory lives on - and shared with others -
with a touch of fairy tale in a real world.

Acknowledgment: Safari World, Ayutthaya the Ancient City, Thailand.

Under an Old Tamarind Tree

 Under an Old Tamarind Tree 

Dr Abe V Rotor

Century old tamarind. Iboy, San Ildefonso, Ilocos Sur.

NOTE: Tree was toppled by typhoon and flood, c. 2005.  

Its wood was made into furniture and used as firewood.

 It matters not if it's the past, present or future

To believe in the trees that talk and laugh and cry;

To believe in spirits in them as their soul,

Our ancestors said, and sages would tell you why.

Time doesn't change, it only moves on and on,

Like the sun and moon, not even the steeled mind;

The earth that nourishes the living - tree or man

For change catches only those at the edge of time.

And here man creates another world of his own,

He cuts the trees, levels the hills, rapes the forest,

Drains the swamps, a Tower of Babel he builds

Where a tree once stood cradling a bird's nest.

It's a noosphere of lust and pride against order

Of the universe, the unity of all creation

In prayer and song, in dynamic balance supreme,

That spells salvation and eternity - or oblivion. ~

35 MEANINGFUL GARDEN QUOTES Model Miss Angie Tobias

    35 MEANINGFUL GARDEN QUOTES

 Living with Nature Center, San Vicente, Ilocos Sur  

 Model Miss Angie Tobias

on her Birthday July 21, 2025

Christmas Season and New Year 2026

Photos by Dr Abe V Rotor

"The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided." —Thomas Moore

“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Seedlings of Ilang Ilang (Cananga odorata)

"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace." —May Sarton

"Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade." — Rudyard Kipling

 

Kamote or Sweet Potato (Ipomea batatas)

"To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow." — Audrey Hepburn

"The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies." — Gertrude Jekyll

 

Alugbati or Malabar Spinach (Basella alba) in two views.

"Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years." — Unknown

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." — Chinese Proverb

Seedlings of Caimito (Chrysophyllum cainito)

"We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses." – Abraham Lincoln

“All gardeners know better than other gardeners.” — Chinese Proverb

“Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.”

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

 

Talinum or waterleaf (Talinum triangulare), a leafy vegetable.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

Talinum or waterleaf (Talinum triangulare), a leafy vegetable.

“When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.” – Minnie Aumonier

“For me, the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden, or they are branches of the same majestic tree. Therefore, they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect.” — Mahatma Gandhi

 

Seedlings of Anahaw (Livistona rotundifolia)

"A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them." — Liberty Hyde Bailey

“The best tool in the garden is the knowledge of a gardener." — Unknown

 

Flowers of Katuray (Sesbania grandiflora)

"The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul." —Alfred Austin

"Gardening requires lots of water, most of it in the form of perspiration." — Lou Erickson

 

Seedlings of Caimito (Chrysophyllum cainito) and acacia (Samanea saman)

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Gardening is the purest of human pleasures." — Francis Bacon

Seedlings of Umbrella Tree (Terminalia catappa)

“Flowers are the music of the ground from earth’s lips spoken without sound.” —Edwin Curran

“Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.” —Sigmund Freud

Seedlings of Guyabano (Annona muricata)

“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.” —Georges Bernanos

“Watching something grow is good for morale. It helps us believe in life.” —Myron Kaufmann

“Flowers are the music of the ground from earth’s lips spoken without sound.” —Edwin Curran

Art Workshop in the Garden with Fr Felix and the author playing the violin)

"Show me your garden, and I shall tell you what you are." — Alfred Austin

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” —Elizabeth Lawrence

“Gardening is full of mistakes, almost all of them pleasant and some of them actually instructive.” —Henry Mitchell

Driftwood resembling the Philippine Eagle 

(Pithecophaga jefferyi)

“Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” – Og Mandino

“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.” —Georges Bernanos

Ornamental pineapple (Ananas bracteatus)

“Garden as though you will live forever.” – William Kent

“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.” – George Eliot

Enshrined bust of Rizal in the Garden

 “In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly, yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.” —Truman Capote

"A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all, it teaches entire trust." - A Treehugger says

  

Country lass Angie Tobias holds a bountiful harvest of karamay (Phyllanthus acidus).

“A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.” —Wendell Berry

“In every gardener there is a child who believes in The Seed Fairy.” —Robert Brault

"I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow." – Abraham Lincoln

"God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures." – Francis Bacon

"The garden year has no beginning and no end." - Elizabeth Lawrence

Acknowledgement with gratitude: Miss Angie Tobias, Internet for quotes ~

Friendly Insects

                                            Friendly Insects

Nest of Green Tree Ants (Oecephala smaragdina); biologist
examines colony range and distribution.

Dell H. Grecia*

Columnist, Backyard Ventures

Women’s Journal

Before you grab the fly swatter or reach for the can of Baygon or Raid, think of creepy crawlies as part of Nature’s healing system. Here, read on and learn why some insects are here to stay.

Like herbal plants, some insects possess their own medicinal value. Or so says out friend, Dr. Abe V. Rotor of the University of Santo Tomas and St. Paul University, Quezon City.

Bee sting, for example, cures arthritis and rheumatism. In fact, the number of doctors and clinics that use bee venom as an alternative medicine is increasing in the United States and other parts of the world.

The treatment is as simple as introducing the excited bee over the affected area, say, the knee or elbow. By holding the struggling bee with forceps, its posterior needle is aimed at the infected area. Once the needle is deeply embedded, the bee is removed. In the process, the sting with the attached poison sac is torn off, resulting in the insect’s death. (This is the same reason a male bee dies after mating with the potential queen during nuptial flight). The poison sac contracts rhythmically, as more poison flows into the affected muscles and nerves.

A. The Mealy Bug

The mealy bug (Dactylopius coccus), which produces cochineal, is another insect that has medicinal value. It is presently cultured commercially in the Honduras, Canary Island, Mexico, Peru and Spain.

Extensively used as dye, cochineal was later discovered to possess properties that allay pain. It is reported to be effective as well against whooping cough and neuralgia.

B. Fly Maggots vs. Deep-seated Wounds

During the First-World War, relates Dr. Rotor, a certain Dr. W. S. Baer noticed that wounds of soldiers who had been lying on the battlefield for hours did not develop infections such as osteomyelitis, as compared with wounds treated and dressed promptly after they were inflicted.

The reason: the older wounds were found to be infested with maggots. These maggots are larvae of flies; commonly houseflies and the blue bottle flies. The adult flies can detect the smell of blood. They deposit their eggs around the wound, anticipating that their larvae are assured of food provided by the injured tissues.

This led to the practice of rearing maggots under sterile conditions and introducing these surgically clean maggots into wounds to eat the microscopic particles to putrefied flesh and bone. The practice, however, ended with the introduction of modern drugs and surgery. To show how effective this practice was, a survey revealed that 92 percent of 600 physicians who had used this treatment reported favorably about it.

A renowned researcher, Dr. William Robinson, was able to isolate a substance from the secretion of the maggots which he believed to have a healing effect on infected wounds, acting like antibiotics. This material – allantoin - soon became commercially available, as its importance began to be recognized.

Allantoin is a harmless, odorless, stainless, painless, and inexpensive lotion which, when applied to chronic ulcers, burns, and similar pus-forming wounds, stimulates local- rather than general- granulation. Thus, it is of special value in treating deep wounds such as bone marrow infection, where the internal part of the wound must be healed first.

Allantoin solutions cannot be as efficient as using living maggots in the treatment of bone infections, however. This is because the maggots actually eat out the necrotic tissues and kill the pus-forming bacteria by digesting them. In the process, the maggots continuously secrete minute quantities of allantoin in their excreta to the very depth of the wound, especially where the use of surgical instrument is limited if not dangerous.

With the advent of computers and other gadgets, modern medicine (except, perhaps, in very remote situations) has finally shelved the practice of using maggots on wounds, and it is likely to remain there.

C. Cantharidin: A Cure-All Drug and Aphrodisiac

Dr. Rotor explains that Dr. Rufino Gapuz, also a professor, discussed in his class a way to harness and calm down a cow that is in heat so that she can be brought to the corral for breeding. This was in the sixties, when artificial insemination was something new in animal science.

There is an injection that comes from the blister beetle, the so-called Spanish fly or Lytta vasicatoria. This insect occurs in abundance in France and Spain, a relative of the American blister beetle.

The beetle carries in its body cantharidin. It was used as folk medicine during the 19th century for all sorts of ailments and also much as an aphrodisiac. At present, it is used in treating certain diseases of the urinogenital system and in an animal breeding.

D. Ant Secretion

With the decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics as a result of increasing resistance of pathogen, says Dr. Rotor, the search for more potent ones has widened into various fields, which today include plants, fungi, and protists - monerans notwithstanding.

One potential source of antibiotics is the green tree ant, a member of the large order of insects Hymenoptera to which bees and wasps belong. Like their relatives, the green tree ants - locally known as hantik (Oecephala smaragdina) - live in colonies. This social behavior enables them to grow in numbers of hundreds or thousands in a single colony, which can remain active for a long time. Other than its reported antibiotic property, the leaf nest of the green tree ant relieves inflammation when bandaged on the affected area.

According to Walter Linsenmaier, the green tree ant is famed as a weaver ant, not on account of its architecture that consists merely of a pile of leaves pulled together, but because of their method of working. When fastening two somewhat separated leaves together, these ants line up on the edge of one of them, holding onto it with legs stretched full length behind them and, working together, pull up the other leaf with their mandibles.

Meanwhile, other ants, with the spinning larvae in their mouths, weave the leaves together. If the distance between leaves is too great for an ant to bridge the gap, the ants form ladders; these not only make it possible to pull the leaves closer together, but also serve as a bridge of the weavers. The larvae secretion may be extended inward to strengthen earlier ties and provide lining to the brood. It is this secretion that reportedly is an effective remedy against wound infection and inflammation.

E. New Frontiers

Dr. Rotor has listed down some new frontiers in the insect world as cures to various pathogens, to wit:

• Anti-venom and poison antidotes are derived from Hymenopterans. Many victims die of insect bite every year that there is a need to develop a ready source of anti-venom vaccine and antidote. Can insect venom also apply to other kinds of poisoning?

• The secret of hibernation among insects can serve as a model for cryonics science in humans. To cross the vast space in future interplanetary travel, man will have to defy time and aging. One means is through planned hibernation.

• Parthenogenesis is an unusual reproduction of immature insects without the benefit of sexual reproduction. Could this “virgin birth” apply to higher animals and humans? When threatened by lack of food and inclement weather conditions, aphids reproduce even before reaching full maturity and without the involvement of gametes.

• Insects that are highly resistant to putrefaction such as among Dipterans may be the key to cancer prevention and treatment. Blue bottle fly maggots can survive acidity up to 10 percent. Hence, they are found to breed in vinegar and fish sauce substrate without apparent harmful effect to the process and end products.

• The burning and obnoxious secretions of certain insects, particularly Hemipterans, have yet to be developed as repellant against other pests.

• In the case fireflies and glow worms, the substance luciferin emits virtually 100-percent light without emission of heat. This substance has many possible uses in industry and medicine as tracer.

• The high protein content of certain insects like termites, silk worm larvae, and grasshoppers (three to four times higher than beef, milk and eggs) has great promise in the development of high-value food. Protein capsules, for example, can be made convenient for those who lead busy lives.

• Chitin of insects is the envy of plastic manufacturers. It is much stronger, yet very much lighter. Its many uses include the control of nematodes using chitin preparations. Chinese doctors recommend insect exoskeleton as a remedy for a hundred and one ailments.

Dr. Rotor concludes that insects, the most numerous and oldest of all animals on earth, have reasons for their existence. Although they are generally regarded as notorious destroyers, the truth is that our well-being hinges much on their presence and persistence. They are part of Nature’s healing system. ~

-------------

* In memory of the late Dell H Grecia, journalist, environmentalist and friend.

Love the Lacewing Insect

                                            Love the Lacewing Insect

Dr Abe V Rotor

Common lacewing (Chrysopa sp.) collected at Amadeo, Cavite 2010

The lacewing belongs to the nerve-winged order of insects, Neuroptera, together with the antlions, mantisflies and owlflies - and some 4,300 known species.

It is also called aphidlion because its larva feeds mainly on aphids, indistinguishably mingling with its prey until it pupates in a silken cocoon where it spends brief quiescence. Then it metamorphoses into one of the most beautiful creatures on earth.

Its delicate wings act like prism that splits light exuding an aura of enchantment. But such beauty is discreet and ephemeral mainly by its diminutive size and nocturnal habit. Lacewings are rare to find, yet there are instances when they swarm like midges, a phenomenon that puzzles scientists to this day.

I have learned to love the lacewing. At one time in the middle of the night she came and alighted on my notes. She greeted me, her long antennae waving, and like a bird, preened her wings bringing in the rainbow in the middle of the night. It was a most beautiful scene in the dark which is indeed a rare experience.~

Home, Sweet Home with Nature, AVR

Evolving Art Series: "Capture Ephemeral Nature in Paintings"

   Evolving Art Series 

"Capture Ephemeral Nature in Paintings"

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." —Albert Einstein

Dr Abe V Rotor

 

Remnants of termites mounted on apocalyptic background painted 

in acrylic by the author.  On display at Living with Nature Center,

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

High rise in ruins cower

to time, pest and weather,

their grandeur gone forever.

Will man ever remember?

Cave entrance reminiscent of Tabon Cave in Palawan, 

relief painting in acrylic by AV Rotor. 

Stalactite on the guard, 

stained by a fiery past;

home of man long before

he became an outcast.

Profile of a human face on our Milky Way galaxy, 

acrylic painting by AV Rotor.  

Images of human abound,

in living colors and sound;

 serendipity or providence,

captured as evidence.  

Treetop convergence in acrylic by AV Rotor

 Living with Nature Center

Trees make a community of their own,

they talk, sing, embrace one another;

designed by nature after they're sown,

living in unity together.

Microalgal colony in a pond in acrylic by AV Rotor

  Living with Nature Center

It's a world of the minutiae,

thru the microscope we see,

 but a shade of its entirety, 

much less its diversity.

Tree skeleton clinging on a rock cliff, by AV Rotor

 Living with Nature Center

It's counterpart of the sacred Cross;

let's save Mother Nature at all cost.

 

The Last Deer, wood carving against a dying waterfall 

mural by AV Rotor, Living with Nature Center

"Two symbols on the wall,

neither the fairest of all."

Edge of land and sea, detail of a wall mural by AV Rotor.

Living with Nature Center, San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

"It's a reflection of a scenery,

      opposite of a sweet memory." ~

Reference 

Philippine Literature Today
Copyright 2015 by C & E Publishing, Inc 237 pp
Abercio V Rotor and Kristine Molina-Doria