Gardening with Wilson

My usual Q&A section for Straits Time’s Life! Design section is up again this weekend. This time, I really love the title that came with it – LUSH, CAUTION!  

The next bit came out today. It was notified by my good friend and collaborator from NParks, Cheow Kheng that I made another appearance in the papers. I was wondering what it was and found out later that there was a picture featuring me working together with my fellow friends in the community garden.

I am pleasantly surprised that community gardening is now ranked top as something fashionable to do! Hope more highrise dwellers come join in this activity!

It was a rainy day yesterday but that did not hinder the meeting with Ray Lemieux, a succulents specialist from Tropiflora. Ray is here in Singapore until the coming Sunday to oversee the first shipment of bromeliads from Tropiflora for the Gardens by the Bay project.

He first got to meet Lily, a fellow member from the Green Culture Singapore discussion forum, who grows a variety of plants that he is interested, which include hoyas, dischidias and various ant plants.

Through the meeting, Lily and Ray exchanged contacts for future correspondence and I was glad to witness that. This is one of the reasons why the GCS discussion forum was set up for, that is, to let likeminded plant lovers meet, share their experiences, swop plants, etc.

We also brought Ray down to Woon Leng nursery, which is perhaps the only nursery in Singapore that stocks a large array of collectors’ hoyas, dischidias and various ant plants at present.

We ended with lunch at a coffeeshop at Choa Chu Kang where we got some local fare for Ray. Before we left, we took the picture below

P/S: Many thanks to Anton who brought Ray to meet us as well as following us through the entire time. Thanks for paying for the food I was trying to order. Please allow me treat you guys the next time ok!

Also thanks to Lily for agreeing to the visit to your garden and bringing Ray around Woon Leng.

Chong Ren – hope you enjoyed the trip yesterday despite the wet weather. Help me to thank your Dad for driving us around.

I was pleasantly surprised some time back when Shirley from CIB, NParks told me that there will be a Thank You Reception for the speakers who delivered gardening talks to the public in the libraries.

What’s more, CEO NParks, Mr Ng Lang, will be gracing the event and giving out the certificates of appreciation to them!

The efforts of our GCS members to share our knowledge with the public have been recognised.

In turn, we also gave our tokens of appreciation that were designed by Phillipe to our collaborators from NParks, AsiaOne.com, Home Concepts, the Singapore Gardening Society as well as the National Library Board to thank them for their support.

It is hoped that fellow members of GCS will come forward to join in this effort to promote gardening by introducing and sharing their plant interests with fellow Singaporeans.

The certificates of appreciation from NParks to our speakers.

Myself, giving my Thank You speech to everyone present.

The members who received the certificates with the rest of NParks management staff that I have been happy to have worked together with to promote gardening.

One more Q&A column being put up on the local broadsheets today.

Some clones of  Nepenthes ampullaria were available at very affordable prices during the recent GardenTech 2007.

Bought the clones with all red pitchers, all green and red speckled green pitchers. Only managed to pot them up in a mixture of burnt earth and peat moss for growing in the outdoor environment.

I like Nepenthes ampullaria most because of their globose pitchers. The plants can be pruned to grow as a mat of basal pitchers which will look very pleasing!

It is nice to have plants in the home because they not only clean up the air but they also help to liven up the interior.

Visitors who visited the recent GardenTech 2007 fair will see a showflat reminscent of a ground floor condominium with an outdoor patio the moment they step into the Hort Center. In there, visitors are given ideas as to how to integrate plants into their living environment in an aesthetic way. It was tastefully done with relatively common plants.

However, I wonder if the visitors, especially those who are non-gardeners or novices, are aware that such placements are not meant to be long-term displays. There is a vast difference between what is interior design and real gardening.

For these plants to fluorish in the home environment on the long term, one has to be aware of the plants’ requirement for humidity and light. In the display examples shown below, the plants are treated like pieces of home decor items, with the lack of consideration for their cultural requirements.

They are nice and perhaps novel ways of displaying the plants, but beware they are meant for display purposes only and not for long-term successful growing of these plants. One may want to rotate display plants with others so as to ensure we do not kill them in the expense of aesthetics.

Tillandsia xerographicas above a cooking stove in the kitchen. These plants need more light that what a typical home kitchen can offer. Besides the fumes from cooking will kill the plants.

It is nice to have herbs at your hands’ reach in the kitchen but these plants need more sunlight than what can be expected from a location shown above. These plants are best located on a sunny windowsill with at least 6 hours of direct sunshine.

Another wrong way of positioning airplants in the home interior. Airplants need more light and they should be located on the windowsill or balcony.

The most heart wrecking display. These Nepenthes veitchii should have been potted up! The roots were still stuffed inside the tiny plastic bag for the ease of transportation. The lack of water will kill these slow-growing species in no time! They must be given more humidity also.

One last thing is the vertical gardens that NParks is experimenting and promoting. The variegated Aechmea is a tank bromeliad which needs water to be in the central reservoir. By orientating the plant this way will void the plant of its water, which will eventually cause the plant to die…

I was at the GardenTech launch last Friday where I also witnessed the naming of a new Borneo Exotics Nepenthes hybrid. In the picture below are Mrs Christina Ong (Chairman, NParks) and Mr Ng Lang (CEO, NParks) who officiated the naming of this delightful hybrid.

This beautiful intermediate-growing hybrid is a result from a cross between a cool-growing highland species (Nepenthes ventricosa) and warm-growing lowland species (Nepenthes ampullaria). It should be able to thrive under our lowland, hot and humid conditions.

In my opinion, this poor hybrid has been given a rather tacky cultivar name - ’GardenTech’. A better name could have been thought of. The plant features stout pitchers that are uniformly coloured in red and have peristomes that appear to have been rubbed with even darker red, glossy lipstick paint. This plant has *SEXY lips*!

‘GardenTech’ has short internodes and tendrils. What results is a tidy plant with great horticultural value. The rather young plant shown in the picture below has pitchers arranged symmetrically all around the plant – don’t you think the pitchers look like little red apples sitting on a plate? I told Diana from Borneo Exotics that this plant has great potential to be a Chinese New Year festive plant.

I didn’t buy any ‘GardenTech’ this time, due to the scary price tag it carries. I shall wait for the Singapore Garden Festival 2008 when younger and smaller plants are available. Hopefully they are more affordable then.

I had been busy with the preparations for GardenTech 2007 which explains the lack of posts through the entire of this week. GardenTech 2007 is an exhibition that gathers commercial companies, societies and instituitons that have products or services that cater to the needs of horticulture and gardening.

This year, this exhibition was held at HortPark, a new park slated to be a gardening hub for Singapore. The location is so new that many cab-drivers are not aware of its exact location!!! The pronounciation for the  name “HortPark” can be quite tricky on the tongue. Many cab-drivers wondered where is “HOT Park” when the name is not properly pronounced.

The location of HortPark is quite “ulu” or “god foresaken” to many people. Many of my GCS members have lamented the problem of accessibility and questioned about its future. Singapore’s quite small so accessibility should not be a problem and there is talk that there will be shuttle bus services in the near future. What matters are the activities that will take place next time. They must be able to draw people from all over Singapore to come.

Earlier this week, a couple of GCS members and I were involved in setting up the GCS booth. We moved in on Thursday, just one day before the show opened actually. This time, we got a new team member, Phillipe, who is our creative director.

We took a daring approach and our booth this time around wasn’t the typical “plants only” type of booth expected of a gardening group/society.

Phillipe used shadows of humans to depict the three actions necessary to be part of the GCS discussion forum – Join, Interact and Discover. The “join” word is self-explanatory – you need to register to join in the discussion. “Interact” refers to the mingling between members via the active discussion of gardening related topics. “Discover’ points to the new ways of doing things coming from the inputs contributed by fellow members.

He also mounted various bromeliads on driftwood logs to add colour to our booth. We also wanted to showcase bromeliads as easy to maintain houseplants that anyone can grow.

The use of a black table cloth really makes our booth stand out amongst the others for other gardening societies and institutions. I must say everything was tastefully done.

Kudos to Phillipe! Your contribution really made a difference to Green Culture Singapore!

The crowd around our booth on Sunday, which was the third day of the GardenTech. The heavy downpour did not deter people from coming though.

Just put up two feature articles for the month of November written by Cindy and myself on the Green Culture Singapore website.

Cindy wrote an article on the Cephalotus and I wrote another one on the white mugwort.

Growing Cephalotus follicularis in Singapore

Cephalotus follicularis is known as the Albany Pitcher Plant or West Australian Pitcher Plant. This distinctive species has a reputation of being difficult to grow and not readily available for purchase even from overseas nurseries. Read this feature article written by Cindy Ng to learn more about this carnivorous plant as well as how to care for it.

URL – http://www.greenculturesg.com/articles/nov07/nov07_cephalotus.pdf

Introducing the Artemisia (Part One) – White Mugwort (Artemisia lactiflora)

This is the first article of a series consisting of three articles written by Wilson on the genus Artemisia. It focusses on the white mugwort, which is both a vegetable and medicinal herb that is not commonly available in local vegetable markets but one that most senior Chinese Singaporeans will be familiar with.

URL – http://www.greenculturesg.com/articles/nov07/nov07_artemisia_lactiflora.pdf

Another new instalment of Q & A for gardening was published on the Life! section in the Straits Times today.

A small correction in my advice:

I realised that there was something misleading in the text. 

Brushing the flowers of the chilli will not help it to produce flowers but will help to the plant to improve fruit set, provided that the lack of fruit set is due to the lack of pollinators.