The garden with its ochre painted walls and border edge trim, mossy teracotta and river stone hardscapes accented with wooden timbers, many still with bark detail, works beautifully with planting of lush green ferns, palms and other large tropical shrubs offering a variety of leaf shapes.

Gnarly tree roots, stands of different shaped bamboos, carved wood trim on the buildings, patterned terracotta planters and some well placed water features all add up to a sophisticated mix of visual textures to the design.

The colour palette choices of warm ochres and terracottas, with natural old wood, river stones and fresh leaf and mossy greens make for a very pleasing design. The mustard yellows of bamboo culms and ripened coconuts add even more resonance to the palette.

There had been some news of the centre potentially being moved so I wanted to document the gardens as a great example of a well designed tropical public garden space with an interesting colour vibe for future reference.

For paid subscribers, below the paywall: you can download these extra resources, which you can use for your own projects.

• Photo Album of all images in pdf form

• Colour Palette based on the images with colour #

Read more

The Cherry Now

May 2008

Housman’s poem captures the bittersweet experience of witnessing the extravagant but temporal beauty. Hard to describe the opposing sensations of melancholy and joy one feels, at the BBG at the peak of blooming. So many people, so much color under its canopy and when the breeze picks up and the petals snow, time seems to stand still. But the fallen petals on the ground accumulate as that moment of exuberance and euphoria slowly but surely slips away.

The Japanese concept of Mono No Aware, the bittersweet awareness of life’s transience, symbolised the week long event of Cherry blossom, is rooted in Buddhist traditions, reminding people to appreciate the beauty of the present moment, as life, like the flowers, is fleeting and constantly changing.

Cherry Impressions

May 2009

I had just walked under that tree with cherry blossoms overhanging the pond in the thumbnail, having taken taken a gazillion photos of those blossoms. The combination of water and flowers, reality and distortion. I squinted my eyes blurring everything even more and thought of Monet.

I wasn’t alone, there were plenty of others there with cameras. I could hear the whirr and click of their shutters. Then I saw the artist painting the scene, in the tradition of many who have over the centuries been trying to capture the the beauty of Sakura since the Edo period, going on to influence impressionist painters, even showing up in a 2021 exhibition by Damien Hirst. All of us capturing what is now probably our last impressions of spring.

Soundtrack: AI Generated

Manhattan, April 2008

There are some unique aesthetics of springtime in Manhattan that I used to really enjoy. Small gardens and tree lined streets burst into life set against a backdrop of paint and masonry in shades of concrete, taupes, and terracottas that heighten the new spring palette of colours of budding branches, emerging leaves and flowers.

The juxtaposition with the geometric grid of the city is like a jazzy, syncopated melody set against the linear rhythms of urban architecture. Foliage and flowers thread through chainlink fences, reflect in the glass and shiny metal of parked cars and apartment windows, bringing surprising new color notes to a city once full of cold gray shadows and dull walls. I also love their pairing with painted plywood hoardings or the graphic patterns of billboard posters as a backdrop, reminding me of kimono prints or oriental screens.

The energy in the city begins to shift as people walk a little slower, dress a little lighter to enjoy the beginning of warmer days. They start to crowd the farmers’ markets and linger on park benches as they begin to enjoy being outside again.

Wikipedia commons 1 | Wikipedia Commons 2

Establishment and Origins

The birth of the Garden can be traced to maritime disasters. In 1644 and 1647, Dutch ships including the Haarlem and Nieuwe Haerlem were driven ashore at Table Bay. During their time stranded, the survivors managed to reap vegetable crops from salvaged seeds, proving the Cape’s fertility. On their return to the Netherlands, survivors Leendert Janz and Nicolaas Proot submitted a report to the VOC Directors stressing the advantages of a refreshment station at the Cape.

Jan van Riebeeck arrived on April 6, 1652, with clear instructions to search for the “best and fattest ground” for gardens. The site chosen was the Table Valley, a region previously dominated by Peninsula Shale Renosterveld vegetation and used for seasonal grazing by First Nations groups, such as the Khoe. Before the Garden, numerous freshwater springs drained from Table Mountain into the bay, which provided the necessary irrigation.

The first ground was prepared for sowing on April 29, 1652. Although early attempts were hampered by strong winds and unfamiliar seasons, the settlement was successfully supplying passing ships with fresh vegetables within two years. By 1660, the Garden occupied roughly 18 hectares.

Individuals Responsible for Key Stages

Several individuals played pivotal roles in the Garden’s transformation:

• Jan van Riebeeck (1652–1662): The commander who oversaw the initial clearing and establishment.

• Hendrik Boom: The first master gardener who sowed the first seeds and laid out the initial vegetable and physic gardens.

• Jan Bundervoet and Herman Gresnigh (1658–1670): Head gardeners during the period when the Garden became a critical supply source for the VOC fleet.

• Simon van der Stel (arrived 1679): The eleventh Governor who transformed the Garden into a more ornamental and architectural space, introducing canals and the first permanent buildings like Tuynhuys.

• Hendrik Bernard Oldenland and Jan de Hartogh: Master gardeners under Van der Stel who assisted in the Garden’s scientific and scientific-ornamental evolution.

• Jan Andries Auge (1747–1783): A Superintendent who shifted the Garden’s focus toward botany and indigenous flora, undertaking numerous collection expeditions.

• Sir George Young (1799–1801): A British Governor who attempted to close the Garden to the public for his private benefit, resulting in a public outcry that eventually forced it to remain open.

• Sir Harry Smith (1848): The Governor who appointed a board of commissioners to establish a formal Botanical Garden.

• Professor McOwen (1881): A botanist invited to develop and manage the Botanical Garden phase.

• Sir Herbert Baker (1930s): The architect who designed the Delville Wood Memorial Garden, introducing the broad cross-axis layout seen today.

Company Gardens at the Cape of Good, Hondt, Pierre d’ / Schley, Jacobus van der Atlas of mutual heritage

Evolution of the Planting Scheme

The Garden’s layout changed drastically over the centuries. In the 17th century, it was a practical kitchen garden laid out in rectangular beds enclosed by high hedges of ash and brambles to serve as windbreaks. These beds were irrigated by stone-lined water furrows (grachten) fed by mountain streams. Under Simon van der Stel, as free burgher farms began to produce more food, the reliance on the Garden for produce diminished. Consequently, he transformed the site with an elaborate system of canals and began introducing ornamental plants.

By 1791, descriptions indicate it was still divided into rectangular blocks by hedges but featured more exotic trees and indigenous plants. During the 19th-century British occupations, as the site was renamed the “Botanical Garden” in 1848, the formal grid was replaced by curving pathways, a rockery, and specialized areas like a succulent garden and a fernery. In the 20th century, following the establishment of Kirstenbosch in 1913, the Company’s Garden evolved into a public pleasure park. The construction of the Delville Wood Memorial in the 1930s established the modern axial design that links Queen Victoria Street to the Iziko National Gallery.

Images from: Company’s Garden Self Guided Walk.pdf

Impact & Importance

Notable Botanists

The Garden was a site of pioneering horticultural work. Key botanists included Hendrik Bernard Oldenland, who compiled a 13-volume herbarium vivum used by Linnaeus, and Jan Andries Auge, who led the shift toward growing ornamental and indigenous species.

Notable Horticultural Species

• Saffron Pear (Pyrus communis): Planted around 1652, it is believed to be the oldest cultivated tree in South Africa.

• Witte Wijnappel (Malus domestica): The variety from which the first apple was picked in 1662; an heirloom specimen was reintroduced in 2019.

• English Oak (Quercus robur): Introduced on a large scale by Simon van der Stel to beautify the landscape and provide timber.

• Outeniqua Yellowwood (Podocarpus falcatus): Magnificent indigenous trees likely planted by Auge.

• Tree Aloe (Aloidendron barberae): Named for Mary Elizabeth Barber, a 19th-century woman botanist.

East Indies Seed & Plant Supply

Besides its provisioning role for the VOC, the Garden was a strategic acclimatization laboratory and trial ground for plants being moved around their empire. It functioned as a global center of exchange; Jan van Riebeeck’s diary records seeds arriving from Brazil, including watermelon and pumpkin, as well as guavas and tea from the Far East.

The Garden played a vital role in supporting other colonies; it was responsible for supplying herbs, seeds, and medicinal plants to Batavia and other VOC stations in the East Indies. Its success in establishing Western-style agriculture was the “foundation stone” for the colonial expansion of Southern Africa.

Current Status and Modern Use

Today, the Company’s Garden is a vital green lung in the built-up inner city. its’s original 18 hectares, whittled down to 3.2 hectares by institutional creep ie the construction of the Houses of Parliament, museums, and galleries along its edges. It was proclaimed a National Monument in 1962 and is now a Provincial Heritage Site.

To honor its history, several re-establishments have occurred:

• 1929/1930s: The Rose Garden was built and the Delville Wood Memorial Garden realized.

• 1968: The parterre garden at Tuynhuys was reinstated.

• 2014: A VOC Vegetable Garden was re-established as a project for World Design Capital, showcasing urban agriculture and supplying local restaurants with fresh greens.

The modern Garden is used for leisure and tourism, popular with office workers during lunch hours. While it no longer feeds entire fleets, the Garden remains a multi-layered cultural space where citizens enjoy a shady green space with nearly 400 years of history.

Footnotes

1. A Short History of the Company’s Garden, Cape Town | The Heritage Portal

2. Company Gardens in Cape Town | South African History Online

3. Company’s Garden Self Guided Walk.pdf

4. The Company’s Garden, Western Cape: preserving the heritage of Cape Town’s earliest colonial history

5. The Company Gardens, Cape Town. | South African History Online

6. The Company’s Garden | The Garden History Blog

   ---

   Botanical Research

Soundtrack: Prelude in C# minor from Between two worlds by Maya Filipič

At the end of winter, when its too early to call spring, daffodils, if planted in enough numbers would have created enough tufts of foliage to form an undulating carpet of green waves with shots of yellow. This is my favourite part of daffodil season, when they are more foliage than flower, more green than yellow or white but make it clear that there is no turning back. Spring has absolutely arrived.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Dylan Thomas

This green-ness seems more ‘right’ after the deadness of winter, the dull, morose palette of greys yielding to bursts of green, calming but also explosive and regenerative.

Host of Daffodils

Soundtrack: AI Generated

all at once I saw a crowd, A host of dancing Daffodils; Along the Lake, beneath the trees, Ten thousand dancing in the breeze. Wordsworth

Soon the blooms will outnumber the leaves and be joined with early flowering shrubs and tree blossoms. Like a liberty print in a palette of pinks, yellows and greens, banishing winter into a thing of the past. This flower explosion seems almost like a short lived madness, a party that ends too soon.

I’ve never grown daffodils. Bulbs of any kind seemed like a layer of gardening complexity I had yet to master. But I always made it a point to visit the botanical gardens when I lived in NYC- both times: in spring, when the daffodils were green and when they were a riot of bloom. I think these daffodils were on Daffodil hill at the Brooklyn Botanical garden.

In my post Botanical Memories - I detail what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and a timeline of how this process evolved. I’ve now ascribed new category descriptions for them, listed here, which matters only because each requires different technical skills, software and equipment - which will become a new baseline for these kinds of capture going forward.

• Flipbooks are now re made into animated layers and/or videos with a soundtrack called Visual Essays

• Those that are collections of artwork or more processed images- are Picture Books

• And then there are Video Sketches & Stories

I’ve felt a sort of urgency to go back, reorganize, and re-edit them so I can repost them here on Substack, in an effort to make sure I don’t lose them, as some of them are in formats or on platforms I don’t use anymore. As I’ve been doing this of late, I’m wondering - why? Why go back sometimes decades ago to retrieve these small captures of botanical and landscape memories? Why does it matter? Why am I spending all this time repurposing them, and why did I spend all that time learning the technical skills to make them in the first place? The answer came to me last week when I read this astonishing essay about ikigai by .

In the essay the author describes Ikigai not as the famous Venn diagram showing the intersection of “what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for” designed by Marc Winn, which most Japanese people have never seen and which Japanese people would not use to describe Ikigai, as in Japan it does not include or mention career optimization.

Ikigai is not a grand purpose; it is a micro-connection, it’s in the micro-architecture of daily life, it’s about the power of savouring small joys. It can require no one else but you, in the quiet act of savouring — finding and fully tasting the small pleasures woven into ordinary life. He describes Komorebi ; sunlight filtering through trees, as Ikigai in its most distilled form, coincidentally the subject of my last post.

With this clue, I found more words and explanations adjacent to this concept. In German, Dasein is the vernacular term for “existence”. It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being there. Phenomenology is a 20th-century philosophical movement and method founded by Edmund Husserl, focusing on the study of conscious experience from the first-person viewpoint, describing phenomena as they appear, rather than through objective, scientific analysis, investigating the essential structures of experience and meaning.

Then there’s Memento mori (remember you must die), a philosophical and phenomenological practice of acknowledging the inevitability of death to live more intentionally, virtuously, and presently. Nathan Nolan wrote a piece in Esquire about it, which his brother Christopher turned into a movie considered a 21st century masterpiece of cinema.

Memento vivere is the opposite, translating to remember you must live. It serves as a 19th-century counterpart to memento mori, acting as a reminder to appreciate life, be present, and enjoy the moment rather than just focusing on mortality.

Christopher Nolan shortened the title to simply Memento to better reflect the film's focus on the subjective nature of memory, where his protagonist Leonard, whilst seeking vengeance, focuses on the mementos - physical reminders, and evidence: photographs, notes, and tattoos - that he uses to construct his reality.

And there it is: Memento, the perfect word to describe what I’m trying to craft here: evidence of being there, seeing, savouring, and remembering. It’s also a solution to the fear of losing these memories. In the photo to illustrate this post, I have a pendant I purchased years ago, made by Ben Rongen from a shard of broken pottery from the Portuguese Wanli shipwreck of 1625. It’s sitting on a broken piece of wall from Pudu jail, which a friend retrieved when they demolished it and gifted to me without actually knowing until I told her that my great-grandfather was an early European warden there. These relics sit on a native ikat textile I purchased in Sarawak.

As I’m retrieving, mending, and reposting older memories, I’m cognizant of how they represent things I may never return to or see again- no more bleak memories of cold winters or summer weekends and neighbourhoods I once called home. In this process of organizing, renaming and recategorising however, I am also re-establishing the processes and techniques of creating new memories and savouring them with a plan to continue building this collection of small joys that is telling my biology that this life continues to be worth experiencing.

I lived for just over a year in San Francisco, working for Levi’s. I arrived slightly before New Year’s and lived in corporate accommodation in the Marina District area, experiencing the strange Y2K paranoia at that time, with shops boarded up and everyone staying at home fearful about going out.

After some exploration, I discovered how different the neighbourhoods were particularly in terms of microclimate. I sublet a place for awhile and then eventually found a charming little cottage on Potrero Hill. The neigbourhood was sunnier and warmer than most of the others in the city and I liked being close to the Mission and Dolores Park. This was no mean feat as San Francisco was experiencing a huge spike in newcomers to the city at this early stage of the dotcom era.

On regular walks around Potrero, I began to notice the shadows of trees and large shrubs projected onto the walls of houses. Something about these shadows - modulated by the distance of trees or shrubs from the house, or their size. Wall colours and textures they fell on - would create interesting shifts in mood, all with an ethereal, cinematic quality.

I began to notice some particularly beautiful ones, when the light was good, dreamlike impressions of trees, abstract splashes of dappled light and shadow. I liked how organic shadows contrasted with the geometric planes of doors, gates and grills. Wall colours would tint the images with particular colour tones and their textures would create different canvases.

A few weeks before my consultancy work tenure ended and my planned return to New York City, I walked all around the neighbourhood, photographing these shadows to have a record of them. The photo of shadows on wooden shingles is particularly poignant as it’s a view from my little cottage, which had a large Wisteria vine, an Avocado tree and a winter-flowering jasmine that clambered all over the fence.

Soundtrack: AI Generated

Because I had to fix some of the images in Photoshop, I decided to animate the layers - maybe I’ll keep this format for picture books. I also used iMovie to create a short video and am now testing AI generated soundtracks, which I’m liking.

In February 2009, due to a last minute cancellation, my friends’ family dog up at Mamaroneck needed a sitter while they went on vacation, so I went up to take care of Mayzie. For some reason, during my stay, I became aware of the winter light which seemed different from the grayer New York City version I had left behind.

It distorted through old glass windows, got caught in mirrors, and diffused through lace curtains with abstracted glimpses of the outside, sometimes randomly reflected in the glass of bookcases or framed artwork. There were ghostly apparitions of trees caught in the net of fabric shades. The images I captured on camera were interesting enough to put together as a flipbook: February Light - which I’m reuploading here

Earlier in March of 2008, I had similarly been fascinated with images captured at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens conservatory, of hothouse flora housed in glass and steel, similarly distorted by condensation and a confused paradox between the tropics inside and winter outside. These images captured in Behind Glass made me think of often imagined futuristic cities behind glass, but with a slightly Blade Runner dystopian edge of rusted steel and algaed glass.

Looking at those images, it made me think of a couple of things: firstly, that there really isn’t a February version of light here in the tropics. There is an early morning light that starts somewhat softer, but still creates high contrast shadows that I capture here in this video as I enjoy a morning coffee on my porch while listening to a rich soundtrack of ambient tropical sounds:

Morning Coffee

And then there is a second kind of view that I find myself photographing over and over - and that’s the view of the outside, usually through an open window or door. On review, I have enough images to get back in the habit of making collections of them, so here is my first return to these photo collections or essays taken in the tropics.

But first, let me note this exhibition that happened in 2011 at the Met in NYC that I could only view online, as I had already returned home to Malaysia: Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century, detailing the appeal of one of the richest motifs in the visual arts: the open window.

Everything at a distance turns into poetry Novalis

The open windows pictured in the exhibition describe an important seasonal feature: they are of summer, when windows can be open. Which perhaps explains my earlier described fascination with the Februry light capture, perhaps, this bridge or juxtaposition between a closed inside and with the cold outside light seeping in.

Here in the tropics with its endless summer, the images I am capturing are generally high contrast between the brightness of the outside and the deep shade of my vantage point inside, literally capturing the cool interior experience of being inside, looking out at a hot, humid, outdoor landscape. Occasionally, the light is softened because it’s evening or garden layers.

This could be through a window, doorway or in the shade of a cafe, porch or verandah, which here in the tropics is a kind of third, indoor outdoor space. People are softly lit or sharply silhouetted. Sometimes the diffused light through closed glass windows offers a painterly scene or captures the patterned details of frosted and colored glass. Sometimes it’s of a softer evening light. I’m also often taking product shots of syrup drinks with a background of an open window.

Shaded Views

Soundtrack: Ambient Classical Guitar

The images are from a variety of places: at my home, visiting friends’ homes, shophouses ( a rattan shop, a toddy maker, a tinsmith), sheds ( a salvage place, my garden shed), alleyways, tents and a few heritage places (a local Chinese Heritage Museum, an old house in Bangkok).

Whilst I’m reuploading older flipbooks online, I think I’m going to move on to only making short videos of these visual essays.

2008

In 2008 a NYTimes article A Landscape in Winter, Dying Heroically introduced me to the work of Piet Oudolf. While his work described as “ecology meets design” with a bias to natural landscapes and associated with a gardening movement called New Wave Planting , New Perennial Movement or Dutch Wave, it also had a particular and unusual new focus on plants in winter. Some excerpts of his quotes from the article:

“You see a lot with dead plants,The shapes and forms, the seed heads in contrast with the grasses. When it freezes it looks even better.”

“You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see. It reminds you of something in the genes..nature, or the longing for nature. Allowing the garden to decompose meets an emotional need in people. You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

Almost immediately I was stirred to re look at the winter landscape happening outside in NYC - right at that moment, it resulted in photographs that I would turn into my first flipbook The Park in Winter. Dried grasses, frozen skies, crisp shadows, evergreens and an irrepressible spring bursting through.

It would continue to inspire me to continue to take notice of not only the dried relics of plants but also patches of evergreen - here are some photos I took near Central park’s Conservatory Garden, located at East 105th Street and Fifth Avenue,

2009

In Jan 2009 I started playing around with some of these wintry inages, reminded of Andrew Wyeth’s iconic, bleak American landscapes in winter like the one below on the right Trodden Weed.

By Dec 2009 I had enough inages to make a flipbook of artwork called Bleak Beauty

This new appreciation of Winter aesthetics would also lead to making some wintry video sketches:

2010

In Jan 2010 I bought an Android phone. Slowly but surely how I was photographing things began its inevitable evolution into where I am now - practically never with a camera, only on my phone. I no longer had to have the intentionality of packing my camera nor the chore of transferring image files. This would all eventually lead to automatic storage in the cloud with ever increasing improvement in photo quality on the phone including blurred background bokeh.

In April 2010 I returned to Malaysia. The winter of 2009/ 2010 would be my last one. I have come to wonder if my drive to create content and artwork on the subject of winter was largely a coping mechanism. Back home in the warmth of the tropics, I allowed myself to admit - I really, really hated the cold. I have no inclination to ever return to a life that requires adapting to the misery of cold freezing weather. But I’m glad after 36 winters, the last few I was able to engage with in a more positive and creative way.

2025

In my move on to this Substack platform, I have begun to recover and reorganise some of my past work that has become lost due to shifts and changes on the internet which I explain here. I’m still not sure if I want to keep to flipbook formats or move completely to video- so here is Park in Winter reformatted to video with an added soundtrack - a beautiful requiem of winters past, never to be endured again.

Soundtrack: Prelude in Eb major Maya Filipič

These are short video sketches I made a while ago, which I’m updating slighty and reposting here on Substack and YouTube.1 Now that I am living in the tropics and unlikely to be experiencing these winter landscapes again - I wanted them to be accessible memories of the light and mood of winters past.

Sparkle

Soundtrack: Double Rondo by Steve Howe.

A Winter’s day on South Street Seaport, NYC where I lived for a while, a short walk from the views shown here of the winter light sparkling on the East River.

Snow Day

Soundtrack: Faust Arp by Radiohead

I had something in mind when I went down to Riverside Park, NYC that Sunday, I wanted to video some high contrast footage of trees and tree branches so that I could play with some effects I had in mind. When I got there, I was completely surprised to find the park filled with families with young children making good use of the recent snowfall. I ended up shooting some footage of them because they just looked so happy. The effects ended up making it seem like a distant childhood memory of a Snow Day.

Grass Harbour

Soundtrack: Jeux D’Eau by Ravel

I filmed the clips for this on the cusp of winter and spring around the edge of Mamaroneck harbour. All the snow had melted and the water seemed to be ready to hydrate the spring ahead.

Related

Starting a Rose Garden

I began planting a rose garden when I discovered I was able to source named varieties. A lot of the plants available in local nurseries are usually without labels so its hard to know how to even plan a garden without knowing their identities and potential characteristics. I eventually found some specialist rose nurseries that had them clearly identified.

Like many, I always associated roses with cool temperate climates, but have learnt over the years that they have in fact a complex history with strong roots in Asia, with its earliest known cultivation in China 5000 years ago. Roses whose provenance includes Chinese or West Asian/Middle eastern heritage I’ve also discovered, are more likely to thrive in our tropical heat.

It’s been an expensive experiment having ordered many varieties, learning along the way how they behaved, oten they behaving quite differently from describtions in the breeder’s literature. Thus began the mildy obsessive research on online resources, forum posts of people growing roses in tropical areas of the US and the mixed first hand experience sometimes of failure but also sometimes glorious success.

Asian Roses

CHINESE ROSES

Chinese Roses: Rosa Rugosa | Rosa Chinensis: Old Blush |Rosa Mutabilis

The well known Beach Rose- Rose Rugosa is in fact an East Asian variety found in Japan and China and introduced to the West in the 1800s as an ornamental plant and for coastal erosion control. It thrived in harsh conditions, leading to its wide spread naturalisation in many parts of Europe and North America.

China roses Hybridisation with Chinese Roses is what transformed European roses and made them repeat blooming increasing their popularity.

INDIAN ROSES

The ancient Indian text, the Rigveda, mentions the use of roses in religious ceremonies and for medicinal purposes. The ancient Indian epic, Ramayana, also mentioned the use of roses to decorate the palaces of kings and queens.1

Whilst India is well known for growing roses, particularly for making rose water and garlands for worship, the only native tropical wild species is Rosa clinophylla. It is found in India in places ranging from north-eastern states like Manipur , Assam; Bihar Orissa Andhra Pradesh and Orissa to Karnataka in south India. Rosa Clinophylla has been a key rose in the the work of rose breeders Viru and Girija Viraraghavan.

WEST ASIAN ROSES

Gallica roses come from Turkey and the Caucus, and the Damask rose comes from Syria. It is this damask rose that is the source of rose attar that has been widely used for centuries in perfumes. Historically, Romans imported roses from the desert climes of Egypt, nowadays most of these roses are commercially grown in hot climates from the Middle east through to India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam.

SOUTH EAST ASIAN ROSES

Whilst ther are no native roses in South East Asia there is evidence of a rose garden “Teijsmann Garden” section at Bogor Gardens, built in 1884 by Melchior Treub, described as “a small garden with French rose garden layout”.

ASIAN ROSE TRAITS

Asian roses brought two important traits into European breeding schemes -

• repeat flowering from Chinese roses

• strong fragrance particularly from Syrian Damask roses which is the standard type grown for making roe water and essential oils.

A rose is a rose is a rose

‘A rose is a rose is a rose’…. ‘by any other name would smell as sweet’ .

These oft quoted phrases penned by Gertrude Stein and Shakespeare respectively speak of the universality of the rose’s essential identity and universal, recognisable appeal.

But as I continued to acquire more plants for my rose garden I noticed the diversity in names for roses with names alluding to all manner of themes: theatrical, romantic, historical places or characters like Hyde Hall, William Morris, Falstaff, Othello with a heavy lean towards French ones Florence DeLattre, Jacques Cartier with Japanese rose breeders in particular leaning into French names like Moulin de Galette, Mon Couer

Sometimes they would provide clues to their breeders origin like Calcutta 300 from India or Queen Sirikit from Thailand. Sometimes not, like Summer Fireworks from China. Three rose names in particular, tell some fascinating stories of genetics, identity, origin and hybridisation.

MAGGIE

Maggie is a fragrant burgundy-red rose found by William Welch in Louisiana, USA in 1980.

This early Eurasian hybrid, combining Asian (China rose) and West-Asian/European (Damask, Bourbon) bloodlines. has been involved in a number of mysteries. Even the name is a puzzle. this is a rose for the world, adapted to more climates than perhaps any other old rose. Probable parentage: Rosa bourboniana ( Bourbon Rose Edouard lineage = R. chinensis × R. damascena ) × Another China-type or Hybrid Perpetual rose.

But thats not the only name or origin story of this mysterious rose - here are her other identities/names:

Mme. Eugenie Marlitt: The rose was dedicated by Geschwind to the author Eugenie John (1825-1887) who used “Eugenie Marlitt” as her pen name.

Pacific a found rose from the Bermudas brought there by the captain of a French ship

Kakinanda Red a rose grown throughout India“

Julius Fabianics de Misefa at Sangerhausen

Zi Yan Fei Wu a found rose from Taiwan and Japan

Research continues to determine if all the above are as supected, the same rose. DNA analysis so far has confirmed samples of “Kakinada Red” , “Pacific”, and two samples of “Maggie” as genetically identical. 2

Maggie is what Malaysians know as the humble kampung rose, its fragrance and resilience to hot weather ensuring its continued popularitey

EDOUARD

Rose Edouard is a natural or accidental hybrid between a China-rose and a Damask rose listed in 1837 in Hortus Mauritianus as a China rose native of eastern Indies. Legend has it that, on the island of Île de Bourbon (modern Réunion, in the Indian Ocean) sometime around the late 18th or very early 19th century, planters hedged two rose types in parallel rows: one a European/Oriental type probably Quatre Saisons also called Autumn Damask and the other a Chinese repeat‐flowering China-rose Old Blush.34 5

A gardener named Édouard Périchon noticed a seedling among these hedges that differed. He transplanted it to his garden, and eventually the Paris‐based botanist Jean Michel Bréon sent seeds of it to France (around 1820) where it became the founding form of the “Bourbon rose” class.

This rose is cultivated in India as R. borboniana and also known as Paneer rose is the most popular rose for use in garland making grown from the extreme south of India up to the northern plains where apart from use in temples and garland making, it is also used for the extraction of rose oil.

Bourbon roses in turn influenced later rose classes (Noisette, Hybrid-Teas) giving the modern garden rose much of its repeat-blooming character and rich fragrance.

THE INGENIOUS MR FAIRCHILD

Of all the David Austin roses I’ve purchased - one name stood out : “The Ingenious Mr Fairchild” was so odd that I was compelled to google it. Turns out it’s the title of a book by horticultural writer, Michael Leapman -h ere’s a description of the book:

“By the early eighteenth century, botanists were inching towards the shocking truth that plants had male and female organs and reproduced sexually.The first person to realize the practical implications of this was Thomas Fairchild, a London nurseryman, and celebrated author of The City Gardener. By transferring the pollen of a sweet william into the pistil of a carnation, he created a new plant that became known as Fairchild’s mule.The first man-made hybrid in Europe, it heralded the thousands of new varieties available to gardeners today. Scientific and religious debate raged around this primitive form of genetic engineering and satirists wrote lewd verses about sex in the flowerbeds and railed against meddling with God’s design.”

Understandably the man who named the rose, David Austin, would give a nod to the man who would enable him 300 years later to build a 20M GBP business meddling with god’s design, Frankensteining 150,000 trial roses a year without any issue nowadays, an outrage nowadays reserved for vaccines.

Keeping a Rose Garden

Growing roses has remained a feature of my gardening practise, but maintaining a rose garden is definitely harder than many of the other varieties of flowers that I grow. It wants more fertilising - weekly foliar sprays and monthly ground manure. They are quick to dry out and a vigil eye needs to be kept if there are too many dry days, but they also hate getting wet feet so the beds they get planted in need lot of preparation to ensure they are well drained.

They also require regular checking and pruning to ensure they don’t succumb to mould, infestations and rot- especially as I maintain them organically without pesticides. Despite all that additional care they can still quite quickly, spiral into poor health, die off and require replacing. Thankfully the rose garden sort of funds itself, I sun dry the roses to sell to bakers for garnish and beverage clients for infusing into their liqours - particularly the Damask variety.

Down by the water things are blurred, abstracted, distorted.

The images are from a variety of places taken in early spring: Central Park, New York Botanical Gardens and Mamaroneck but they all share the same sense of contrast - shapes and lines against ripples and blurs.

This was originally a flipbook - one of quite a few botanical memories that I’ve lost access to, so I made a video with the images and added a field-recording of gentle waves on a lake shore by Benboncan, License: Attribution 4.0

I also made an AI generated soundtrack for this video on Udio but they won’t allow downloads now, which is too bad as it would have worked well - prompt was impressionistic piano music - here is link to the piece.

I was recently alerted to a current well received exhibition at Kew Gardens: Flora Indica: Recovering the lost histories of Indian botanical art,

“One of the most significant collections of botanical art at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, was made in colonial India between 1790 and 1850. Over 7,500 drawings documenting the flora of South Asia were commissioned by British East India Company employees, but created entirely by Indian artists. These works of hybrid art travelled to Kew by various routes - some from private collections, many from the Company’s India Museum in 1879.”

There’s also a new book Flora Indica Recovering Lost Stories from Kew’s Indian Drawings: by Dr Henry Noltie, Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Natural History Museum, London, that accompanies it.

Flora Indica presents a representative selection from the previously fractured, uncatalogued, and largely inaccessible collection of over 7,000 Indian illustrations in Kew’s archives, through which readers are invited to discover the important lost histories of Indian botanical art from the age of empire. With a foreword by art historian William Dalrymple.

I have coincidentally also been collecting, for my own research similarly titled books and collections of illustrations under the catregory of Flora Indica that I have organised below. It includes links to image databases and digital books online including downloadable pdf’s

Some of that research was for an Indian Temple Garden project

Botanical Books

Botanical Illustrations

Botanical Research

Read more

I was invited by my friend Anne Louis, a writer and journalist to join the team working on the curation of the Arulmigu temple’s new Indian Heritage Centre. The temple in downtown Johor Bahru, is the oldest Hindu temple in Johor, with a rich history intertwined with the settling of the city’s Indian community in Johor Bahru.

The centre would reflect not only the cultural aspects of the community, like weddings and other rituals, it would also show how the community participated and contributed to the city’s economic, social and cultural growth with exhibits illustrating traditional trades and enterprises like rubber tapping, jewellery making and money lending.

I was additionaly tasked to add a Temple Garden that would be sited at the foot of the stairs up to the Heritage Centre. It was a small site, tiled and without any planting space, so everything had to be in pots and containers. The client also wanted a large wall banner that would be visible from the upstairs entrance that would detail a curated list of plants selected for their ethnobotanic importance to the community.

That list itself was a fascinating exercise as Anne, myself and a small team of members from their temple leadership and experts with knowledge of language and religious and cultural practise worked on curating what would eventually be a list of 24 plants with significant meaning to the community who originated mainly from the southern states of India during the British colonial era. It would be a list that needed also to be of interest to the many tourists that visit downtown Johor Bahru where the temple and centre were strategically sited.

Both Anne and I weren’t Hindus and merely listened in as the temple team debated what plants would make the final cut of twenty four, ensuring we covered plants used for ritual, food, adornment, decoration and medicine. Some choices would reflect a more localised Indian community that had some differences to usage in sub continental India, for example while Frangipani is featured more in Indian culture, here the native Magnolia Cempaka is preferred.

Whilst Anne worked on the text content for the banner and other aspects of the heritage centre, I sourced images from public domain vintage illustrations and it all had to be translated, graphically designed and coordinated for printing. Already delayed and under pressure to complete, Covid hit and the project was interrupted significantly. The delay spanned across new temple elections and a change in leadership, which also made for a shift in direction for both the centre and the garden. It did however all resolve and the opening was a successful event officiated by the Chief Minister of Johor.

Not long after, Anne Louise tragically, passed away and the garden will always remain a great memory of working with her on this project.

The plant list - a valuable curation of plants important ethnobotanically to the local Indian community, is paywalled here below but the information is freely available and visible to visitors to the temple.

Related

Read more

This article describes my interest in natural landscapes or wildscapes, the sources of inspiration that inform it, work I’ve done in this style, and areas that are still just experiments or on a mood board for the future

Inspiration

PIET OUDOLF

Piet Oudolf came into my sight line when I was living in NYC and there was much hype around his hire as the landscape designer for the High Line which was about to open. In 2008 he had worked on Battery Gardens which I got to see and was one of the first visitors to the High Line when it opened in 2009. It was extraordinary and it was clear that this landscape style dubbed the New Perennial Movement was a new era of influence in garden and landscape design.

THE NEW PERENNIAL MOVEMENT

The ‘Dutch Wave’, is a naturalistic, plant-driven design that mimics or takes inspiration from nature that began in Holland and Germany, led by plants people like Mien Ruys, Karl Foerster and Henk Geretsen in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But really made famous by the Piet Oudolf who has brought this dream like style of garden design to the world stage. Whilst these are not traditional cultivated gardens, neither are they actual prairies, woodlands, or meadows, at the whim of natural forces. Rather, they are composed and curated landscapes that evoke a site’s ecological past.

COTTAGE GARDENS

The precursor to this New Perennial style is the English Arts and Crafts Movement's Cottage Garden - expressed more as an exuberant, romantic abundance of flowers, herbs, and edibles. Vita Sackville West’s versions of these types of gardens at Sissinghurst, which I had the opportunity to visit, added more sophistication with controlled colour palettes - pictured above is the warm sunset colour tones of the cottage garden there. Her introduction of larger woody shrubs in the flower beds also changed the aesthetics and scale of the beds, their geometric edging heightening their lush, wild planting. My first foray into gardening was planting and designing cottage gardens for myself and for family and friends.

Projects

Natural Woodland

MIGRANT GROVE

My first landscape project to capture a natural landscape was Migrant Grove which had a few key elements: wild underplanting, a meandering path and as shown in the video a real sense of movement when it caught a breeze - this dynamism acting as another layer to the visuals eliciting a kind of emotional response to the viewer.

Then I did the 7.5 acre Heritage Forest which notably had these two micro woodland landscapes:

STREAM SIDE WOODLAND at HERITAGE FOREST

HYPERDENSE FOREST at HERITAGE FOREST

Tropical Wild Flower Meadows

WILDFLOWER HILL at HERITAGE FOREST

At the Heritage Forest project, I was keen to develop a tropical version of a flower meadow prevalent in the New Perennial Movement - a Wildflower Hill: sloped grassland planted with flowering Bamboo Orchid growing through Pogonatherum, in the background shrubs of Calotropis Gigantea and Rhodomytrus Tomentus with a winding path through it.

The planting combination is somewhat reflective of real landscapes that you might see on waysides, streamsided and grasslands. meadows are actually more rare here in the tropics- although one might establish, particular in disturbed land areas, they would quickly transition into secondary forest as larger trees seede themselves

THE VEIL

For this project in 2024, I added a more stylised plant assortment mixing small trees at the back, woody shrubs, grasses, flowering shubs and groundcovers . I also created more contrast in colour using burgundy and lime green foliage. The landscape was designed for wedding events that usually entailed photography - the path through it afforded long views through the meadow that created interesting blurred backgrounds.

Practises, Experiments, Future Plans

Landscape in a Vase

IKEBANA

The premise of ikebana as taught by the Ohara School, which I am trained in, is the expression of naturalistic landscape in a vase. It emphasizes seasonal qualities, natural growth processes, and the beauty of natural environments. Unshin Ohara the founder of the school created a new arrangement form which he called the moribana that would evolve into the Ohara school’s signature “landscape arrangement”.

I began studying it in 2010, took formal exams in it and am a qualified instructor. My ikebana story continues as I occasionally participate in exhibitions and demonstrations and whenever I have material at hand will make some arrangements at home.

In the photos above the picture on the left is from a book on Ohara and what immediately drew my interest, the photo on the right is an arrangement I made at an exhibition a few years later.

Potted Wildscapes

KUSAMONO & SHITAKUSA

Wikipedia | Flickr

I stumbled on this botanic art form - an extension of Bonsai ( which I’m not such a fan of ), these are small accompaniment to larger works of Bonsai, usually of mosses or naturalistic wild grasses. Some other variations of Bonsai include Wabi Kusa and Kokedama.

I often make potted compositions that have this naturalistic wild element and continue to incorporate this into my landscape design work. The circles here cross somewhat with Ikebana, and I often use things I’ve learned about combinations and compostions in Ikebana to create these botanical comostitions - but where ikebana insists the material is cut and put into a vase, here I am planting them with roots into a container with soil.

Vertical Wildscapes

VERTICAL WALLS

Epiphytic plants growing out the sides and tops of buildings is a common sight here in the tropics - the image on the left is a wall in downtown Johor Bahru, a common sight if a property has been left vacant for a while. While Patrick Blanc is credited as having developed the concept in the late 1980s, the actual inventor is Stanley Hart White, a Professor of Landscape Architecture who patented a green wall system in 1938.

Blanc,was inspired during visits to Asia by these kinds of botanic display to turnthem into an installation form - image in the middle is an installation in Paris, that exploded in popularity making it quite ubiquitous the world over - image on the right is at Raffles Place, Singapore.

The ubiquity of vertical landsacpes has made it a little less interesting to me personally - I see vertical walls everywhere particularly in malls and underground carparks. The set up can also be quite costly - structure, watering system and a more challenging maintenance requirement.

I am however interested in using epiphytes that are fairly easily found in this part of the world - see floating wildscapes below.

Floating Wildscapes

I like what Jamie North, an Australian artist is doing with ephiphytes and native plants growing out of sculptural forms. I’m also reminded of the work of Roger Dean an English Artist and Designer who famously designed the album cover art for the progressive rock band Yes. His imagery of floating islands has inspired me (and more famously the designers of Avatar the movie) to experiment with some floating wildscapes - below left is piece I exhibited in conjunction with an art show - and am on the lookout to experiment more with this style in potential future commissions.

I had a good relationship with my step mom, Dawn, having known her since childhood. She was a retired headmistress who had an active social life pursuing her hobbies, one of them being Ikebana, the Japanese art of floral arrangement, where she had been one of the founding members of the local Ikebana Chapter. She had a huge collection of Ikebana books and magazines, and in the limited creative resource space that was my hometown of Johor Bahru that I had returned to, I dove into them, fuelled by my own well developed interest in gardening.

Dawn had pursued study and been qualified with two schools of Ikebana: Sogetsu and Ohara. I was taken with the books about the Ohara School, founded by Unshin Ohara in 1895, which emphasised a naturalistic, landscape-like approach, breaking away fundamentally from the more rigid formal style of the Ikebono school which preceded it and the founding school of Ikebana . I resonated with its evocation of natural landscapes and shortly after approached one of Dawn’s friends about how I could take some lessons.

Luckily this friend was qualified to teach this particular school of Ikebana and I started taking lessons, attending events and pursuing examination certification up to the level of instructor which allows me now to teach it to others. I also participated in exhibitions and was invited to do a few demonstrations. Along the way I switched to a new teacher in Singapore who had lived extensively in Japan and learnt ikebana there.

A side effect of all this was my dad was familiar with many of the ladies in the Ikebana chapter and my reporting of what happened at events and gatherings kept him connected with that social circle that my stepmom once was very involved with and were frequent visitors to our home.

I would eventually get really busy with my new career in landscape design and found time diminishing for the fairly active social component of being in the Ikebana chapter. I continued lessons until Covid interrupted my ability to attend classes in Singapore and then my instructor there returned to Japan where her husband had been re appointed for work. Ikebana is now an infrequent pastime, although teaching it is something I have put on the back burner for a future time. I am partway through completing the next qualification after Instructor- 4th master.

It was a fairly demanding journey, learning this art form, firstly in just the handling of botanic material. It was surprising how much practise and interactive correction by my instructor was required to acquire first competence and then deftness in the cutting, securing and arranging of the leaves, flowers and branches. Then it all had to conform to the Ohara School’s rules of placement, arrangement methods, combination of materials based on season or landscape format, and then the aesthetics, vase choices and spatial balance that all added up to a beautiful arrangement.

As I progressed further, my interest remained stimulated by the Ohara school’s progressive requirement of knowledge of the botany of those arrangements - river flowers with riverside foliage, seasonal elements like berries, red and orange hued leaves for autumnal arrangements. They didn’t just have to be aesthetically pleasing, they had to make botanical sense. I enjoyed the challenge of meeting those requirement born of a cool temperate country, with some inspired choices and sourcing of materials found in my own tropical one. Added to this was the need to scan my own memories of landscape, season and flora of the cool temperate countries I once lived in.

Whilst Ikebana is a Japanese art form first created by monks, then taken up by samurai and the bourgeois class, there is a hybrid transcultural element to this art form. Firstly in the Ohara school’s strong influence from the introduction of western flowers into Japan as the country opened its doors to the world. And then Ikebana travelled to the USA after after World War II, precipitating the founding of Ikebana Internation in 1956 by Ellen Gordon Allen which was instrumental in gaining it global popularity.

As I gained more ability in the technical aspects of creating arrangements, I became less clumsy and faster at forming the spatial and sculptural aspects of the arrangements. As I got more comfortable with this, I could start to consider things I really enjoyed, the aesthetics of colour, negative space and the formulation of botanic and landscape concepts. I would move on to make the search and selection of materials, planning the concepts of the arrangments (as part of the fulfilment of planned examination criteria) and then the photographing of the arrangements as a rich creative process.

All that continues to inform my other botanic and landscape art and design pursuits although admittedly, making arrangements and being part of a community of other ikebana practioners has waned. I do, as I mentioned earlier, want to return to teaching Ikebana but want to formulate a style, rooted in the Ohara school but related to my other interests inspired by the aesthetics and sustainability of using materials that are local and referencing the landscapes of my home country.

GALLERY OF WORK

Lesson and Examination arrangements

Exhibition and Demonstration arrangements

Home Practise Arrangements

IndieFlora is a journal of my Botanical & Landscape, Art and Design stories, creative work and projects. It also includes research on Botanical Literature, Sites and Exhibitions that inform my creative process.

Botanical & Landscape, Art and Design

STORIES

BOTANICAL MEMORIES

OVERVIEW

VISUAL ESSAYS

PICTURE BOOKS

VIDEO SKETCHES

BOTANICAL ART

LANDSCAPE DESIGN

LANDSCAPE INSTALLATIONS

Botanical Research

Literature, Sites and Exhibitions

BOTANICAL BOOKS

GARDENS

Background

I became a gardener many years ago transforming a thin narrow plot in East London into a brick paved cottage garden after much trial and error and with many an inspirational trip to legendary gardens like Sissinghurst and Beth Chatto's garden.

To me, gardens are part larder, part medicine cabinet, part sanctuary, part living painting. I enjoy them for the same reasons artists, medieval monks, peasants and all the folk that identify with the term' gardener' have done for centuries - food, medicine, sanctuary and art. This connection with nature is important to me, but in 1991 I moved to New York City for work living living in a walk up apartment without a garden.

I did however then share a weekend house in Westerly, Rhode Island where I started gardening again. I was also invited by a friend to help design their garden in Mamaroneck. That was when I decided to start documenting my peripatetic, part time career gardening in various places as well as enjoying the public parks of NYC. It was a way of keeping track and making sense of the botanical ideas and work that I was doing. It was also a kind of digital gardening as I tended to this content plot on the wild web, slowly learning the skills needed whilst using the design sensibilites I had already honed in my real job as a fashion designer and creative director.

In 2010 due to family reasons I returned to Malaysia and while I first lived at the family home The Occasional Gardener albeit from a tropical perspective still made sense. But in 2012 I moved to a bungalow with a substantial compound and took on the all consuming job of transforming an old house with a quarter acre of land that had not been lived in for years into my new home. I was no longer an occasional Gardener, I had become a full time one and struggled to update the blog.

In 2017 I had the unusual opportunity to conceptualise and manage two new parks in Iskandar Puteri - Edible Park and Heritage Forest. Landscape design, nature based programming and the business of botanicals had become a new career which I have now decided to start documenting here on Substack. Consider this post a bridge between that previous life and this new one where I will first catch up by writing about some projects I’ve been involved in and then continue to create content derived from the many new botanical and landscape pursuits that I am now actively involved in.

In 2020 we ended our involvement at the parks and I set up JOGREEN: a flower & herb farm at my home site supplying culinary botanicals to the restaurant industry. I also create and manage nature based content and programming over on Nature Based. I continue to do landscape design and pursue botanical and landscape art projects which I will write about here.

Archive - IndieFlora posts

IndieFlora on Instagram and

IndieFlora on YouTube

Index - all other sections:

I was commissioned to conceptualise, design and eventually manage it as part of a larger initiative titled Medini Green Parks, designed around sustainable principles and current thinking in urban green space that also included Edible Park.

CONCEPT

The original concept illustration above, envisaged a view of the North Side of the park that would be visible from the cafe at Edible park across the street - on the left hand side a flowering forest and on the right the main entrance to the park with wild plantings reflecting a coastal landscape and signifying the beginning of a walk through the various landscape themes ahead.

MAIN IDEAS:

- a series of themed landscapes that would be botanically information rich for programming and learning ethnobotany, wild medicine, art of nature and forest school.

-an ability to have a long walk to enjoy the benefits of exercise and the mental wellness associated with being in nature. The walk therefore circled the perimeter of the site looping through the middle to gain maximum distance and steps.

- a sense of safety not enclosing the viewer as is often the case with tropical forested sites where the density can feel oppressive. This required careful consideration of planting distances and plant heights with increased density visible but further into the background of the viewer.

- shifting aesthetics to showcase the beauty of both our native flora and different landscapes with designed moments to encourage photography and sharing on social media. Happiness index studies show that beauty is an important variable in evaluating green spaces and engagement.

- a central hyperdense forest full of native trees like Wild Cinnamon that would remain unmanaged and provide wildlife habitat, & eco services: rain water absorption, air cooling and sound reduction.

NORTH SIDE

Trailhead

A trailhead structure to denote a sense of arrival and entrance into the site with some seating and shade trees like Ficus Benghalesis for groups to congregate.

Beach Forest

Just inside the entrance to the park, a rocky and sandy coastal landscape with tropical pines like Baeckea Frutescens, Sumatra pine, coastal trees like Tillipartum, beach flora like Scaveola Tacada, Mistletoe fig and Beach Morning Glory helps create an immediate sense of distance from the urban surroundings.

Flower Forest

A large stand of flowering trees including Cratoxylum Formosa (some call it the tropical cherry blossom), Cassia and underplanted with pink Ixora and Congea Tomentosa.

WEST SIDE

Wild Flower Hill

A meadow like sloped grassland planted with flowering Bamboo Orchid growing through Pogonatherum, in the background shrubs of Calotropis Gigantea and Rhodomytrus Tomentus.

HalfMoon

A stand of Cratoxylum Cochinense and Penaga underplanted with Rhodomytrus Tomentus and Sword Fern to match the wildflower Hill as the path meanders through these two areas.

Stream

A stand of Tristania, Banyans and Eleaocarpus underplanted with Colocasia, Dianella and Hemigraphis in an area where there would be runoff when there was heavy rain. A Bridge was built over this implied rocky stream to create this stream scape.

CENTRE HILL

Hyperdense Forest

A densely planted, impenetrable forest of Alstonia angustiloba, Cinnamomum iners and Dillenia fruticosa letting it grow wild and further packed with anything that would grow underneath.

Craft Forest

Bamboo for making containers and utensils, Ricefield Bulrush in a wetpatch for weaving and Indigofera for dyeing

SOUTH SIDE

Red Forest

A colour themed planting of red leaved Crape Myrtle, Chinese Honeysuckles, red and orange leaved Syzigiums, Orange Ixora shrubs and red Alternanthera groundcover.

Creek

Colour theme spillover from the Red forest with added Red wax palms and a seating area covered with Bauhinia Kockiana. Both the Creek and the redforest would be visible from the main road that had a large creek like drain separating it from the park.

Perfume Forest

Stands of Magnolia Champaca, Ylang Ylang and Tarenna Odorata trees with the path lined with Aglaia Odorata and Gardenia Tubifera. Powerful perfumed scent as the visitor walked through it.

EAST SIDE

Spice Forest

Stands of Clove, Nutmeg and Cinammon trees.

Healing Forest

A stand of Melaleuca cajuputi underplanted with Sphagneticola calendulacea, framing the herb meadow and edged with Senna Alata on the road side.

Herb Meadow

An assortment of folk and traditional medicine herbs collected from TCM herbalists including Justicia Bentonica, Acmella, Mugwort, White madagascar, Periwinkle and Andrographis Paniculata.

Food Forest

Wild mango, Flacourtia plum and Ardisia berries representing Jungle and survival food raely seen in urban areas.

Ethnobotanic Forest

Agarwood, Tembusu, Neem, and Pinwheel flowers traditionally used for making incense and garlands.

Timeline

The park was first planted in 2018, but it was clear that the original budget allocated was not sufficient to create the density required for best effect. We left it for over a year to mature while we concentrated on launching Edible Park. With the success of Edible Park, we got a second round of funding from our sponsor Khazanah to come back and fill it out with a substantial amount of trees and shrubs with completion at the end of 2020.

We had already started some programming like Nature Class, Forest walks and Campfire cookouts but soon after it was completed, unable to come to agreement with the Medini management team we exited both parks and sadly although Heritage Forest has matured in many areas, its also become quite unkempt and poorly used without the programming that would have built an active community around it.

In 2016 I did a landscape installation in the Mall of Medini called “Golden Fields”. It was intended as a temporary installation primarily to spruce up the existing landscape that was looking a bit tired and provide some visual interest for an upcoming festival.

I suggested we retain the existing Bucida trees, trimming the lower branches a little but the large leaf Cocoloba trees were to be removed as many were in bad shape. Where they were doing ok, they were blocking views across the space- so they were to be moved into planters and sited in more strategic areas.

This would then allow for the viewer’s eye to be drawn downwards to the lower mixed height underplanting with different foliage textures, some with yellow tones and an assortment of flowering plants all with yellow flowers. Effect would be of a soft ‘golden’ woodland under trees and a bit meadow like in more open areas. Below is an illustration of the original concept:

These were the suggested plants to be used:

The installation was to be temporary (approx 4 months) to conform to the festival’s budget and to leave more permanent and costly improvements for a later date. To facilitate this, all new plants were to be retained in polythene bags, packed densely then Coconut coir and wood chips were to be used to mulch visible gaps. It was a quick turnaround that did not require extensive earthwork and planting that would have been expensive and laborious.

When the design was approved we began the search for the plants suggested. The Galphimia gracis wasn’t available but we found a stunning alternative - Euodia Ridlyei. In fact when I saw it at the nursery looking like a giant lime yellow cloud I used quite a lot of it as it created a wonderful dreamlike effect.

The end result was fantastic, even in the evenings the landscape had a golden glow lit by strings of lanterns and was a striking visual complement for the festival.

“Nothing gold can stay.”

I knew when I installed it that it wouldn't stay gold - and made my client aware of it too. There's not enough sunlight under that glass atrium for those plants to keep flowering and that foliage colour for needs bright sunshine. That very issue came up during installation when I had to reject a delivery of the Euodia because they had delivered some from a shady part of their nursery - not golden yellow but green. Although it would not sustain that look indefinitely, that in itself is not unusual in nature - a brief glorious blast of colour like spring flowers or a field of ripened grain in late summer.

The temporary installation was in fact left for much longer. Five months later I happened to visit and took an 'after' photo. Everything had turned green, hardly any flowers and the Euodia had no trace of its old flamboyant yellow self. Although it had changed colour it was quite green and lush and the Bucida trees that were already there loved the extra attention and got bushier. Different but still nice to look at.

Besides ideas about impermanence this did trigger some thoughts about identity and destiny. What if you were meant to be bright golden yellow foliage or to flower profusely but you were born under a glass roof without enough sun? Would it be ok that you never knew? Are you fine being lush and green because everyone else is?

All those yellow flowers were generally not native. What was native: the Euodia, Osmoxylon and Pandanus reveals a botanical truth about the identity of our local Malaysian flora - we aren't really about flowers, we are more about foliage - spectacular foliage, in an extraordinary range of shapes and colours.

The Robert Frost poem that I had in mind when I first conceived the idea turned out to be a prophetic narrative for this landscape installation.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

December 2009

Phone Wallpapers

Free to download and use.

Flipbook:

Click to View Online

Video

Soundtrack: Prelude in E major Maya Filipič

Related