Today is the second day of the Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) and it was a hectic one for me. I started the day early with the Community in Bloom (CIB) Awards Presentation Ceremony where I was up on stage to receive the Platinum Award from Dr Mohd Maliki Osman ((Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of National Development) as well as the Best New Community Garden Award from Mr Ng Lang (CEO, National Parks Board) for my community garden at Serangoon North.
The Community In Bloom Awards are given out by the National Parks Board to inculcate a greater passion for gardening and bonding in the community, as well as, to recognise and honour the gardening efforts of the community gardening groups in Singapore.
I saw many members from Green Culture Singapore (GCS) who were also award winners sitting together with me in the stage area, which included Lynnette who is also a fellow community gardener at Punggol Coral. I am glad to know that so many of our members are also keen supporters of the CIB program. Many thanks to Lynnette, Richmond and Lily who were present at the ceremony to give their support and for their help to take pictures of the event.
Lighting was kind of poor indoors in Suntec City and it was really a feat to take good quality pictures under the low light conditions using a point-and-shoot digital camera.
It was a pity that my Residents’ Committee Chairperson, Mdm Claire Ng, was not able to make it on time to witness the awards presentation ceremony due to an earlier commitment. However, I was grateful for the effort that she made so as to come to Suntec City to support me. She managed to grab some food at the Hospitality Pavilion on Level 6 for some refreshment and we managed to take a picture there as well, in the company of her friends who happened to visit the SGF. What a small world!!!
Shortly after the Award presentation ceremony and the reception, Shirley from CIB, several representatives from various award-winning community gardens and I made our way to the National Library at Bugis. We had two talks in store for the public and the first one was entitled “Afternoon Tea with Community in Bloom Awards 2008 Winners”. There were food and drinks where members of the public who attended the session could sip some tea or coffee and take some snacks where they then sit back, relax and listen to this year’s CIB Awards winners who shared on their experiences in creating and designing their community gardens. Award winners also showed some of the spectacular garden landscape photos of their community gardens.
Mrs Rosalind Tan from Alexandra Hospital who is also famously known as Mdm Butterfly, was also one of the speakers in this sharing session. Some of the topics she shared in her presentation were how the gardens at Alexandra Hospital were started, the reasons why they were started and how the hospital staff as well as external communities came together to enjoy and maintain the tropical paradise there.
The second sharing session was conducted by Mr Albert Teo from the GCS discussion forum. Albert is a young moth orchid enthusiast who knows alot about the growing of this group of orchids. But he is also a shy and reserved young man and I thought it would be a good learning opportunity for Albert if I could drag him out from the discussion forum on his computer screen so that he can put in some guts to face a largely unknown public audience to give a talk and perhaps pick up some tips on how to give a good gardening talk and demonstration.
I was in the room listening attentively as well as watching how the sharing session went on throughout the whole duration. The crowd had to stand as there was not enough chairs and that is an indication of a large following wanting to learn how to grow the moth orchid. I also noticed that there are hardly anyone in the audience who actually walked out or dozed off during Albert’s talk.
Hence, Albert was able to engage his audience very well in this an hour and a half long talk. His slides were clear and the points presented were also concise. The demonstration he did had been systematic and hence easy to follow. After talk, Albert was mobbed by a handful of people as usual around the table where he did his demonstration. Shirley and I both agreed that the sharing session done by him was excellent and he got both of our thumbs up.
My parents actually did visit the SGF in the afternoon. I was not aware of the time they were there as they did not give me a call that I actually requested them to notify me. Hence I felt sad that I was not able to guide them around. Perhaps they knew that I had attend to various commitments described earlier. They told me they were at Suntec Convention Center for almost 3 hours, admiring the flowers and taking photographs. They enjoyed the SGF very much although the air-conditioning was a little on the colder side, especially on Level 6.
