IndieFlora

A New Garden Blooms

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 contentderived from the many new botanical and landscape pursuits that I am now actively involved in.

Welcome to my new garden, there will be a lot to take in as I also get to grips with my social media channels on Instagram and Youtube.