This month, I penned a very simple article on the growing of African Daisies in my constituency’s newsletter.
A plant that bears very colourful flowers, they are quite popular with many people. However, I have heard many failures from people who wanted to give up growing them. Hence I took the opportunity to write about some of the common problems faced and suggested their corresponding remedies.
Hope it helps!
Posted in Contributed Articles, Flowering plants
Tagged African Daisy, Serangoon Newsletter
For those who have known me from the Green Culture Singapore discussion forum when it started about three years ago, they would have been able to tell you that Wilson Wong at that time is basically a farmer and he knew nothing about most ornamental plants and trees. I wasn’t too keen about these plants then.
But in recent times, I declare that I have picked up quite a lot of knowledge and nowadays, I am able to identify most of the common plants grown in Singapore via both their common and botanical names, as well as, the families they belong to. I haven’t stopped learning yet and I hope I can get to know more about the greenery around me.
Interest is definitely an important factor that has been crucial that helped me to accumulate this huge amount of plant-related knowledge but there is yet another factor that I also be given roughly the same amount of credit is the existence of a very comprehensive pictorial tropical plants handbook published by the National Parks Board entitled “1001 Garden Plants in Singapore.”
This book is now in its second edition. I have written a book review on the first edition of this book which has been published on the Green Culture Singapore website some time back. In its second edition, the number of plants have nearly doubled from a thousand and there are still many plants that have yet to be listed.
Although there are still some mistakes, I guess nothing done by humans is totally perfect. I can safely say that the authors and NParks have done their utmost to ensure the information contained in the book is correct at the time of publication. I also noticed that the errors did get corrected with each printing.
As I have mentioned in the book review that I have written, this book goes by the popular saying, “A picture tells a thousand words.” The book’s numerous pictures have helped me to associate the plants I see so often with their names, both common and botanical and later, remember them. The first edition of the book in my possession has fallen apart. It goes to show how many times I have flipped the book just to check and verify the identities of the plants I saw during my nursery trips and other gardening-related activities.
It has another very important use. Because the book is armed with many colorful pictures of plants, one can just flash the picture of the garden plant one is looking for at a local plant dealer and he will instantly know what one wanted. This works better than mentioning a string of English or Latin names which many of our nurserymen are not familiar with.
This book has been lauded (at least by me) a successful publication at home in Singapore. It has also been recommended to Australians living in the warmer northern states in the issue number 5 of the Subtropical Gardening and Landscaping in Warm Climates magazine. I feel proud as a Singapore gardener as a result.
A virtual version of this book is now available – check out NParks FloraWeb which has been launched in January 2008 on NParks’ corporate website. This database of tropical plant information will be updated regularly to include the latest information.
Plastic plant tags can be cheap to buy, for example, in Singapore, we can grab a handful of nicely-made, ready-to-use, white plastic plant tags from Daiso (a Japanese store that sells everything for just SGD 2). But we can make similar plant tags for free most of the time from things that we usually discard or find around the home.
One may ask, “Why bother to make such cheap things?”
The reason that I do so because I can help to reduce waste by doing some recycling to help save the environment. My family have a habit of packing back our meals from the coffeshops and we are left with many disposable food containers which most other families would discard right away after finishing their meals.
I made it a point to everyone in the house to not throw these away because I will eventually find a use for them in the garden. I told my family members to wash them clean with soap and leave the containers at a corner of the house to dry.
An example of a disposable plastic food container (in this case, it is a cup with a lid). One can cut it down to thin strips which can be made into recycled plant tags.
To make your own plant recycled plant tags, all one needs to do is to cut the container into thin strips with a width that you find suitable, as shown in the picture above. Then, simply use a permanent marker to write down whatever information you want to put down on the tag, most commonly, the plant’s name or seed sowing date.
Words that are written on a transparent strip of plastic can be difficult to see and read. To overcome that, I pasted masking tape on the reverse side and because the tape’s white in colour, the background that resulted helps too make the words more visible.
The topmost plant tag is a one that is commercially available. The one in the center is a transparent plastic strip used to make the recycled plant tag. The one located at the bottom is the recycled plant tag with a white masking tape background which helped to make the words written on the tag more visible.
The recycled plant tag in use in my light garden.
Whatever I have mentioned are just the basics. Please let your creative juice flow to help you make more fanciful tags. For example, one can use coloured tape instead of the white masking tape that I have used in the example above.
The plastic strips can be cut to fit the width of the tape one is using so just one strip of sticky take will suffice. I used two strips of sticky tape in my flimpsy example above because I have cut too thick a width.
One can even punch a hole on one end where a string or twist tie can go through it so that the tag can be tied or hung from a plant!
Posted in Garden Hardware, Recycling in the Garden
Today marked Green Culture Singapore’s (GCS) first attempt to conduct a gardening hands-on workshop. During the past two to three years, we have been working closely with NParks’ Community in Bloom and the National Library Board to dish out gardening sharing sessions which involved only talks at the public libraries all over Singapore.
Our first gardening workshop’s title was “The Art of Airplants” and the synopsis is given below:
We’ve all heard of how indoor plants can be used to complement home décor. Often plants are chosen because of the touch of nature that its green colour brings and also for its therapeutic appeal. But have you ever heard of using plants that do not root in soil as a home décor ornament?
Also known as air plants, this workshop gives you the opportunity to learn more about the uniqueness of air plants as well as the basic day-to-day caring needs. More importantly, get your hands on these plants to creatively install them as your office or home miniature setups and scapes that will soon be the envy of many. Brought to you by Green Culture Singapore and NParks.
For those participants who have attended this workshop, I am sure it was totally a different kind of experience from other talks they have attended previously. As an observer and assistant to the session, I noticed it was very much like an art class more than a gardening class. Participants were involved in squeezing out their creative juices and getting their hands busy to make the little bamboo ornament which doubles up both as an airplant holder as well as a pencil holder that can be used to decorate a dull corner at home or the office.
An example of the bamboo ornament that was to be made by participants during the workshop.
I thought, since we have touched on the growing of airplants in the past year in a talk done by Xuan Hong, why not have a workshop that will introduce to people ways to use airplants to decorate the home? Like what I have mentioned in the opening of the session, we have seen for the past 10 years after airplants have been introduced to Singapore, we have only witnessed that few ways of displaying airplants – gluing them on rocks, seashells and driftwood logs as well as tying them to branches of trees. Nothing more.
The intention of this session was hence to introduce new, creative and tasteful ways of displaying one’s airplants. As one can see from the pictures I have taken during the session, Phillipe Noor (on the GCS forum, his userID is Wild Ginger), our instructor in-charge of the session, have shown brilliant examples of how one can turn cut bamboo sections into beautiful airplant holders.
The myriad of possibilities presented by Phillipe that can be used to display airplants nicely at the home or office working environment.
Our talks have largely been rather technical and “how to” in nature and that can be difficult for some newbies to follow and also can put off others. Saturday’s session was our maiden attempt to bring in the lifestyle element to our sharing sessions and aimed to share with others the bit on how we can “enjoy” our plants and gardening. We hope more people will be drawn to take up gardening because plants, as we all know, can be used to brighten up one’s home and can be an enriching past time.
At the same time, we also wanted to bring across to all participants that plants are also living things where we also share with everyone the proper care and the right conditions that need to given to the plants so that they grow healthily and look their best.
Participants happily working away with the guidance from Phillipe to make their own decorative airplant holder.
Last but not least, I must thank Phillipe, who has worked intensively over the past one week to make this workshop possible. He has put in much dedication, effort and time that were put in where he actually went through all the trouble to source for the several meters long, thick bamboo poles, that were all sawn up into manageable sections for the session. One must also take a look at the professionally done up pamphlet he has prepared as well. All the materials required for the workshop were put into a neat, simple brown paper bag that participants can conveniently carry home their creations after the session.
Posted in Events, My Thoughts..., Tropical ornamentals
Tagged airplants, gardening workshop, tillandsia
For the first time, a rather not eye-catching, all green Alpinia in the ginger garden burst into full bloom. Bought last year from a local nursery, this ginger was tagged “Alpina mutica” and is a native to the swampy areas in Malaysia. For those who like common names, this ginger is called Small Shell Ginger or Orchid Ginger. It is a popular ornamental ginger plant and in Peninsular Malaysia, an infusion of the rhizome is taken as a stomachic and for abdominal trouble (source – PROSEA).
I still remember when it first came, the leafy shoots were quite weak, and one can see that the plant was trying to recover from the shock brought about by being uprooted from the ground and then going through extensive rhizome division. The plant looked really sad then.
After it was planted, I had to prop up all the shoots up with bamboo sticks as they got blown about by the wind. Some people could have removed the aerial parts to allow the plant to start anew. Leaving the shoots flopping about in the wind can lead to dessication, which is detrimental to the plant’s health and delay its acclimatisation to the environmental conditions of the location where it has been planted.
About a year has passed, the plant one sees now is vastly different from the time it was planted. It is now a strong, healthy looking plant with sturdy shoots. It has grown taller where the shoots the plant send up are taller than me. It could have attain a height of 2m, fitting in with the botanical description that has been given to this species. The leaves are long and narrow. It flowers quite regularly now as well.
The flowers of this Alpinia are borne on an erect stalk. It is actually quite interesting to see how the stalk unfurls – initially, the entire shoot develops inside a green jacket or sheath and when it is fully developed, the jacket splits open and slips off subsequently to reveal the inflorescence inside. It sounds very much like the metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a butterfly. The flowers are white and the “lip” is orange with numerous red dots and veins and has two red swellings at its tip. At the back of the flower, one can see a small little ball, which is the ovary of the flower. Once pollinated, the flower fade and falls off and little ball swells up and turns into an attractive orange colour when ripe.
Posted in Flowering plants, Tropical ornamentals
I am not a Business Times subscriber. But I was lucky enough to be able to get hold of an earlier interview of my friend, Rosalind Tan, who is now famous and probably better known with her new title “Madame Butterfly”.
This article precedes the earlier message that I posted on this blog a few days ago (click this link to view that post). It talks about the butterfly garden in detail, focussing on its construction, maintanence as well as the species of butterflies one is likely to see on a good sunny day at Alexandra’s Hospital’s gardens.
Alexandra Hospital’s winged beauties
Matthew Phan, Business Times ( 8 Apr 08 )
IT’S a magical place where photographers gather at weekends to snap some of Singapore’s rarest and most beautiful creatures.
The butterfly trail at Alexandra Hospital is Singapore’s biggest open-concept butterfly garden, with more than 100 different species sighted. They include the Common Birdwing, a bright yellow and black butterfly with a wingspan of over 15 cm, which the hospital has contributed to the Istana and the Botanic Gardens.
Unlike at Sentosa there are no nets at Alexandra Hospital to keep the butterflies in – they are free to come and go as they wish.
The trick to keeping them around, says caretaker Rosalind Tan, who was chief occupational therapist at the hospital before she retired two years ago, is to grow the right plants.
The Common Birdwing, for example, may have arrived from Malaysia, flitting from green space to green space until it found the gardens from their scent, she says.
Alexandra Hospital’s gardens, which collectively stretch over the size of two football fields, have at least 500 species of trees and shrubs, including some 200 butterfly shrubs. The latter are fruit trees or flowering plants that mature butterflies obtain nectar from and hosts where they lay eggs.
Each species of butterfly may feed from several plants, but its caterpillar will eat only one particular host plant, says Ms Tan. Many of these are common fruit trees such as mango, guava or banana, but there are also several weeds, such as the common snakeweed, tyler flora and stinking passion flower.
‘You couldn’t buy them from a nursery if you wanted to,’ says Ms Tan, who obtained plant samples from the forest or from friends and cultivated them in her own garden before transplanting them in the hospital grounds.
Other plants are brought by birds, such as the mistletoe, which grows on trees but not on the ground. It hosts the Painted Jezebel, a pretty white-yellow-and-red winged butterfly that ‘just appeared’, she says.
Alexandra Hospital started the garden in 2002 when it decided to plant shrubs along a big drain at the edge of the hospital grounds, a ‘no man’s land’ at the time.
Today, caterpillar host plants are grown near the drain so patients do not see them, while the flowering plants are kept nearer the hospital so butterflies flit to the peopled areas.
Ms Tan is also working with conservation biologist Ho Hua Chew to design wetlands and grasslands at the back of the hospital, to attract birds. Some 60-plus bird species have already been sighted and she is aiming for more than 100.
But her consultants on the butterfly garden were simply amateur enthusiasts, such as the Butterfly Circle, and books, she says.
Posted in Gardening People in Singapore
Some time back, I put up a post on this blog to show how one can pollinate cucumber flowers. Pumpkin flowers can also be pollinated using the same method as shown below. The big bright yellow flowers of the pumpkin are often produced in abundance, especially the male flowers, when compared to the number of female flowers.
Rather than wasting them by leaving them on the vine, the male flowers can actually be picked, coated in batter and then fried to make tempura (click on this link to know more). The flowers of the zucchini are better known to be eaten this way.
To pick up the male flowers either to eat or for as a source of pollen, one has to first learn how to recognise them. As mentioned earlier, male cucurbit flowers have no baby fruits behind their petals. One simply sees a flower attached right away onto a green flower stalk. One pumpkin vine can have several male flowers opened at once. A few can be picked to pollinate the female flowers flowers and the rest can go into the cooking pot.
The female flower of the pumpkin is not picked and made into tempura. The reason is simple – once the female flower is pollinated, it becomes the pumpkin fruit. You won’t want to eat the flowers, right? Anyway, the female pumpkin flower can be identified via the small baby fruit that is located just behind the petals.
See the picture below for the bud of a female pumpkin flower
To pollinate pumpkin flowers, one can go pick a freshly opened male flower. The next step to take is to strip of all its petals to reveal the pollen laden anthers.
With the stripped male flower on hand, now it is time to go hunt for an opened female flower. Once a female flower is found, brush the pollen laden anthers against the stigma of the female flower. In the process, one will notice some of the pollen being coated onto the stigma.
After a day, the female pumpkin flower will fade away but at that stage, its hard to tell whether it will turn into a fruit.
If pollination is successful, the baby fruit behind will slowly swell up, embarking a journey to become a pumpkin fruit in a month of so, depending on the variety.
Posted in Vegetables
Want bees to visit your garden?
Try growing a luffa vine in your garden if you can afford some space. The bright yellow flowers that the plant produces are highly visible to bees. Even the big, slightly clumsy carpenter bee is fond of luffa flowers. I always see a couple of them visiting the flowers of the luffa vine that is grown in the community garden every morning.
Attracting bees to the garden helps with the pollination of other flowers. This is especially important if you are growing fruiting vegetables where poor fruit set due to the lack of pollination is a common occurrence. Hand pollination can be too tedious.
To attract bees to the garden, one has to grow plants that produce flowers that are visible to them. Choose to grow those plants that have yellow, blue or purple flowers. They should also be ‘flattish’ so that the bees can easily land and seek out the pollen in them. This means that single petalled flowers are preferred. The luffa flower is one good example of such a flower.
Besides being able to attract beneficial wildlife to the garden, the luffa also produces fruits that can be eaten. There are several varieties and in Singapore, we are most familiar with the angled luffa with its long club-shaped fruits with obvious raised ridges on its rind. Botanically, the angled luffa is known as Luffa acutangula. There is another species, L. cylindrica, is called the smooth luffa because it bears edible cylindrical fruits with no ridges. The fruits of the latter species are those used to make vegetable sponges. Fruits are allowed to mature on the vine and the skin and seeds are then removed to yield a sponge-like, tough network of fibers.
Besides these two types of luffa, there is one more variety which produces very long, slim, ridgeless fruits. I got the seeds of the cultivar “Special Long” from Known You Seeds which is insensitive to daylength. Fruits can grow up to around 70-80 cm by 3.5 cm, with an average weight of 400-500 g when mature. This type of luffa is popular crop in Zhejiang province in Mainland China.
The luffa plant, I feel, is also a great educational tool. It can be used to teach children about the sexes and anatomy of flowers. The luffa, similar to many edible cucurbits, bears flowers of the two sexes, in an obvious manner, on a single plant. The female flowers have an obvious ovary behind the petals which look like a baby fruit. The male flowers do not have these. One can also use cucurbit flowers to serve as an example to illustrate the process of hand pollination.
Below are some pictures which I took of the female flowers of the Special Long luffa hybrid and the fruit development process.
The flower bud with a long ‘stalk’ is the female flower which develops into the baby fruit (ovary) later on.
The young female flower bud of the luffa plant (cultivar - Special Long).
A recently pollinated female flower with its wilted petals. See the obvious fruit-like ovary behind the petals.
A young fruit of the Special Long luffa.
A fruit that is almost ready for harvest for consumption.
For more information, download the following article which I wrote some time ago, which contains some info on the cultivation of the different types of luffa in Singapore.
http://www.greenculturesg.com/articles/aug07/aug07_luffa.pdf
Some time back, I made a blog post on Alexandra Hospital and its famed butterfly garden. Today, on the Sunday Times, Mrs Rosalind Tan, the person behind the garden, was featured. The papers gave her the name “Madame Butterfly” which I found very appropriate.
I am proud to have a friend like her who has contributed massively to the conservation of nature and wildlife in highly urbanised Singapore. She has retired from her full-time job and many people who have chosen to rest and home and play golf or become couch potato. Rosalind did otherwise. Her current work needs a lot of dedication and commitment and many people have benefited from it.
Madame Butterfly of Alexandra Hospital
The Sunday Times ( 20 Apr 08 )Mrs Rosalind Tan wants to create another butterfly garden.
Called Madame Butterfly by colleagues at Alexandra Hospital (AH), where she has created such a garden, she hopes to repeat the feat at the hospital’s new site in Yishun in 2010.
The senior operations executive started a butterfly garden in AH’s current location in Alexandra Road in 2002, and it now draws 101 species.
It is a commendable achievement given that only about 282 species have been spotted in Singapore.
Mrs Tan, 67, had been an occupational therapist in various hospitals for 12 years before she joined AH in 1982.
Drawing from her experience as an occupational therapist, she knew that a project like a butterfly garden could help in a patient’s recovery.
‘Butterflies have so many colours and patterns. Seeing them gives patients optimism and distracts them from their illnesses,’ she said.
Her husband, Mr Tan Wee Lee, 74, a retired senior principal architect, helped with the landscaping of the 12ha garden.
Set up from scratch, it has trails for people to walk along.
‘We wanted to have a healing environment for patients. We wow them, destress them and distract them from their illnesses by using butterflies.
‘There has been positive feedback from patients, so we know we are on the right track,’ she said.
She had scant knowledge of botany before she embarked on the project. One of the challenges was to identify the different types of plants that would attract butterflies.
Reading up on the subject and getting in touch with butterfly enthusiasts helped, said the mother of two.
Patients are encouraged by the hospital to explore the garden.
The hospital staff also take wheelchair-bound patients there.
Hi Everyone,
Here’s the second instalment of gardening Q&A contributed by me to the Straits Times Life! section for the month of April 08.
Enjoy!
