Mr and Mrs Seng are very keen and supportive members of my community garden at Serangoon North. I paid their home a visit some time back after Mrs Seng told me how nice some Costus species and some other plants that I have passed her some time back have grown. The Sengs’ apartment is one that is located along a corridor and because they do not have a balcony, they could only do their gardening along this public walkway outside their home.
Corridor gardening has always been a challenge to apartment dwellers who love gardening. Security is often a problem as pots of nicely-grown plants can get stolen or damaged by greedy and inconsiderate neighbours. Besides that, the lack of light and overly windy conditions can limit the choice of plants that can be grown.
The corridor where they grow their plants is very well-lit when I visited them and during certain times of the year, they told me the area can receive direct sunshine for almost half of a day. Hence I was not surprised to have noticed that many light-demanding flowering shrubs that their neighbours grow, such as the Bougainvillea, are flowering profusely.
Costus ‘Green Mountain’ – Look at the big lush leaves! The plant’s obviously happy and very well-fed! The plant even flowered successfully when it is grow inside a container.
Another healthy and robust-looking spiral ginger (C. arabicus ‘Variegata’) from me that started off as a small baby that emerged from a stem-cutting.
Look at the juicy and succulent-looking sand ginger (Kaempferia galanga) plants that are grown inside a long trough! It is an unlikely plant to find in a Chinese home! I have seen this plant mostly being grown by our Malay friends.
The few pots of yam plants are also doing very well. Despite the fact that they are full sun lovers, the plants grown in this corridor garden where light is available for half a day or less are colouring up very nicely. The purple plant is Colocasia esculenta ‘Black Magic’ while the bright green one is Xanthosoma ‘Lime Zinger’.
Some of the passionfruit vine trimmings from the community garden were also taken back home by the Sengs where they have planted in a large flower pot. I was amazed with the rate at which the vine in their care grows. It has reached the ceiling already and it surely helps to disguise the ugly-looking drainage pipe it is now climbing on for support.
Another plant that is not commonly seen being grown inside a container and in a corridor garden is the Job’s Tears (Coix lacryma-jobi). The seeds have a very hard shiny seedcoat and are made into jewellery. They are also used in Traditional Chinese Medicine as well. Mrs Seng love this plant a lot and growing it fondly reminds her of the days where she lived in a kampong where this plant was growing in large numbers in her backyard.
