Tropical Gardening

Antiaris toxicaria, Ipoh's terrible tree

2012-01-08T02:05:00.000-08:00

I had this article published in the Star Newspaper yesterday and am placing it in my blog for those who do not read the Star.

Ipoh’s terrible tree

Ipoh is named after the ipoh tree, famous as the source of blowpipe poison. When the Portuguese attacked Malacca in 1511, the native weapon they most feared was the blowpipe with its poisoned darts. It was reported that every Portuguese soldier hit by darts died except one.

The Portuguese had cannons. Replicas of such cannons may be seen as decorative items in historic Malacca and elsewhere. These cannons could not be accurately aimed and they ran hot when fired, making reloading difficult between shots. Many early experiments in science by Galileo in the 1600s and Newton in the 1700s were driven by curiosity about how cannons worked—how the balls shot forward while the cannons themselves recoiled backward, how action and reaction were equal and opposite, and how far a cannonball would fly in relation to its angle of lift. All this is now elementary physics, but in 1511, physics was not yet a science. The Portuguese had learnt to use cannons in earlier battles in Europe, and had already used cannons with devastating effect in sea battles in India. Lack of accuracy was more than compensated by power to shock and awe. Each shot generated its own lightning and thunder, causing the earth to shake and hearts to tremble. The din of native war drums and gongs was totally outclassed by the thunder of cannons. Cannon smoke reduced visibility to near zero, interrupted only by blinding flashes of cannon-lightning. The acrid smell of exploding gunpowder became the smell of destruction and death. A native war boat could be sunk with a single hit, and the native war boats advancing in close formation presented easy targets.

After the fall of Malacca, it took the Europeans more than a century to track down the source of the terrible blowpipe poison. It was the latex of a tree growing in deep forests. The German botanist Georg Everard Rumph, better known by his Latinized name of Rumphius (1628-1702), never saw the tree himself though he was stationed in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) as an employee of the Dutch East India Company. From information given to him about ipoh trees in the interior of Celebes, he wrote “The tree grows there on bald mountains, and one will know it from afar in that no trees grow near it, and that the soil beneath it is barren and singed. “ Every living thing that got close to the tree would die. Each tree occupied a bald mountain, with feathers and skeletons scattered on the ground around it. To obtain the latex, the collectors covered their bodies and heads with cloth because one drop of latex on the skin was enough to cause the body to swell. The latex was obtained with a bamboo stake sharpened at one end. The sharp point would be used to pierce the bark from a safe distance and the sap would run into the hollow of the bamboo.

Rumphius named the tree Arbor Toxicaria (the poison tree) but the word ‘tree’ is not considered suitable as a plant name. It is actually not allowed under the International Rules for the naming of plants. Arbor Toxicaria was renamed Antiaris toxicaria (the poisonous Antiaris) by the French botanist Leschenault de la Tour in 1810, who Latinized its Javanese name antjar to antiaris. Leschenault’s specimen of the ipoh tree became the TYPE specimen of Antiaris toxicaria, and it is permanently preserved in the Museum of Natural History in Paris.

The scientific names of all plants and animals and even minerals are similarly anchored by TYPE specimens. Type specimens define their species and because they are real, they have more authority than any description, drawing or photograph. Most of the type specimens of the world are preserved in the great natural history museums of London, Paris, Leiden and Washington DC, which have consequently become the major centres of reference of the world’s biodiversity.

When plant explorers finally tracked down ipoh trees in their native habitats, such trees were found to be harmless, growing together with other plants and often festooned with epiphytes. Ipoh latex has been closely examined by chemists and physiologists and found to contain cardiac glycosides that interfere with the heart muscles and cause heart failure. However It has to be introduced into the blood stream to be effective. Even so, it is not strong enough and is often mixed with the latex of another plant, Strychnos, which contains strychnine, to make it more potent. The mixture is concentrated by heating over a fire. In the process, its colour changes from white to dark brown. The tips of blowpipe darts are armed by dipping them into the sticky concoction. Blowpipes are still used by the Orang Asli for hunting, but only for small game such as birds, squirrels and monkeys.

Botanists have gradually pieced together the global distribution of Antiaris toxicaria. It turns out to be amazingly widespread. In Asia, it is found from southern India to southern China and throughout South East Asia to Northern Australia, Fiji and Tonga. In Africa it occurs south of the Sahara from Congo to Madagascar. Curiously, the traditional knowledge and use of ipoh in hunting and warfare has always been confined to South East Asia.

An ipoh tree grows in front of Ipoh’s iconic railway station, but the label in front of the tree fails to do justice to its legend. A bald mountain topped by ipoh trees and littered with animal skulls and bones, as visualized by Rumphius, would convey a better idea of the terror that ipoh trees evoked. The city authorities should consider creating such an experience, perhaps in Old Town, close to Concubine Lane, where one can enjoy Ipoh White Coffee in pre-war kopitiams.

(Orang Asli are aboriginal peoples in Peninsular Malaysia; a kopitiam is a Malaysian coffee shop)

Secret Garden of 1 Utama: New Times

2011-12-02T03:01:00.001-08:00

The Secret Garden of 1 Utama will, from December 2011, be open on Public Holidays, Saturdays and Sundays. Also, the hours will be extended from 10 am to 10 pm. Lights have been installed to enable visitors to experience the garden at night. Entrance continues to be free.

A new coloured brochure is being prepared and should be available by Christmas.

The walkways have been upgraded and should not be slippery anymore. A new fountain is being installed in the Kinta Orchid area. We will be putting in new plants that emit fragrance at night and plants that stand out in soft light, i.e. plants with white or silvery leaves and flowers.

The night garden will be a new experience for us. The public, as always, are welcome to share in the experience and to make comments and suggestions.

I met an American couple from Missouri (which has one of the best botanic gardens in the world) in the Secret Garden last week. They come to Malaysia every year and make it a point to visit the Secret Garden. Each year, they notice that the garden looks much better than the year before. I have also met a Professor from Holland--a professor of the history of ideas--who visits the Secret Garden every year, and blogs about it.

What tree did Parameswara really see in Malacca?

2011-11-06T03:21:00.000-08:00

It is taken as a historical fact that Malacca was founded by Parameswara, who named it after the melaka tree. Parameswara, in the legendary account of the founding of Malacca, actually had no idea what the tree was. He had just seen a mouse deer kick one of his hunting dogs and, inspired by the fighting spirit of the mouse deer, he asked his followers “What is the name of the tree under which I am standing?” His followers replied “It is called melaka, your Highness”. Nobody said “Wait, let us check this out.”

I would like to present evidence that Parameswara was wrongly advised. Before anybody questions whether I am qualified to change history, let me explain that my comments are based on botany, and I am, after all, a qualified taxonomic botanist—one who deals with the naming and classification of plants.

The melaka tree, known in Sanskrit as ‘amalaka’, has an ancient and venerable history in Sanskrit culture and medicine. When the Swedish founder of modern plant classification, Carolus Linnaeus, gave this tree its scientific name in 1753, he Latinised ‘amalaka’ to ‘emblica’ and placed it within the genus Phyllanthus. Hence the melaka tree became known in science as Phyllanthus emblica. Phyllanthus emblica is now planted all over Malacca as the state’s iconic foundation tree. Its fruits are sour but edible.

However, what Parameswara saw must have been another species, Phyllanthus pectinatus, which has a superficial resemblance to Phyllanthus emblica.

Phyllanthus pectinatus was first described and named by Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1890, based on specimens collected in Perak, Malacca and Singapore. I first became aware of the possible misidentification when I planted ‘melaka’ trees in FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia), some from seeds collected in a forest, and some from seeds collected from a garden. When the trees grew up and produced flowers and fruits I found that they represented two utterly different species. These differences are obvious when specimens of the two species are placed side by side for comparison. In Phyllanthus emblica, the fruits are clustered at the base of rather robust leafy shoots whereas in Phyllanthus pectinatus they sway in the wind at the ends of the finely feathery leafy shoots. Inside the fruit is a hard stony structure containing the seeds. This stony structure is sharply 3-angled in Phyllanthus pectinatus but rounded in Phyllanthus emblica. There are also differences in flower structure and in the appearance of the bark.

In trying to figure out the relationship between the two species, I checked the specimens of ‘melaka’ preserved at the herbarium of FRIM. A herbarium is a place in which specimens collected by plant explorers are permanently preserved for scientific study and reference. The FRIM herbarium serves as the national herbarium for Malaysia and it has specimens from all over the country, collected by botanists and foresters during the past 100 years of forest exploration. All the specimens of ‘melaka’ in FRIM, collected in forests, were of Phyllanthus pectinatus,

When I had the opportunity to visit the world herbarium at Kew, I examined the collections from all over Asia, including the specimens seen by Joseph Dalton Hooker. I also went to the Botanic Gardens Singapore to check the specimens in its herbarium, which is a regional herbarium for South East Asia. Putting all the information together, the picture that emerged was that Phyllanthus emblica has its natural range across India, Burma, Thailand, Indo-china and South China. In contrast, Phyllanthus pectinatus has its natural range within the Malay Archipelago, especially in Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and Borneo. In their natural state, there is no geographical overlap between the two species.

In brief, Phyllanthus pectinatus is a true forest tree of the Malay Archipelago and it is particularly common in the forests of Malacca state. In contrast, Phyllanthus emblica occurs only as a planted garden tree in the Malay Peninsula and Malay Archipelago. It has never been able to escape and establish itself in our forests.

The best place to see Phyllanthus pectinatus is in the recreational forest of Ayer Keroh just outside the city. This area is now designated as a botanical garden, but its core area is maintained as natural forest. In this forest, there are many natural trees of Phyllanthus pectinatus, mislabeled as Phyllanthus emblica. Just outside the forest, the true Phyllanthus emblica has been planted in various prominent locations for the benefit of visitors. Nobody has noticed that the planted trees are a different species from the natural trees in the forest. What Malacca needs is a botanist, ideally a taxonomist cum horticulturist, to manage its botanical garden.

Malacca may have to accept that it has two iconic foundation trees: the tree that Parameswara saw and misidentified, and the tree it got mistaken for. To me, the native tree is the more attractive of the two.

(An earlier version of this article was published in the Biz Week of the Star newspaper on 5 Nov 2011.)

What are PhDs good for?

2011-10-23T03:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote this piece for the Star Newspaper's BizWeek supplement on September 3. In a remote sort of way, it is related to horticulture and gardening, because my PhD thesis happened to be on the classification of a group of plants called Diospyros, which includes persimmon fruits, ebony timbers and various species now used in bonsai horticulture in Thailand. Since then, I have resisted all attempts to nail me down as a Diospyros expert. It is like Sean Connery refusing to play James Bond so that he could be accepted as a versatile performer. For me, to work for a PhD in order to be nailed down as a narrow expert would be a disaster.

I am now a budding newspaper columnist but since newspaper articles have the shortest life of any publication, I thought I would republish this piece as a blog, which seems to have a better life expectancy.

The piece reflects my role as consulting editor to a scientific journal. I have to tell scientists in Malaysian universities and institutions that they have to publish to stay relevant. They like to claim that they are too busy in 'teaching' or 'administration'.

What are PhDs good for?

Universities award bachelors and masters degrees in different areas of learning, but regardless of the starting point, the apex of academic training is the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. So when I am asked what my doctorate is in, I would say “philosophy”. This would be followed by an awkward silence before we change to a more comfortable topic of conversation.

It is awfully difficult to talk about philosophy, and the modern degree of PhD is not about classical philosophy. While watching an old movie The Wizard of Oz with my granddaughter, it dawned on me that The Wizard of Oz had the answer. In the movie, the Wizard reacts to the scarecrow’s desire for a brain by explaining that the brain is actually a very mediocre commodity—every living creature has one. What the scarecrow really needed, and which the Wizard grants, is the degree of ThD or Doctor of Thinkology. Voila! Thinkology—the art and science of thinking—that is surely what the PhD degree is all about.

Ordinary thinking is what every creature does, each in its own way. But the thinking that goes into becoming a Doctor of Philosophy is very different. What a PhD candidate does is to select a topic for research, and proceed to work on it in an organised and disciplined way. The end product will be a thesis, which would be a new book on the topic. Up to the level of Bachelors, or even Masters, one acquires knowledge from books written by other people, but in a PhD programme, the candidate writes a book for others to use. To emerge from a lifetime of reading books to writing one’s own book requires a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but it would be an intellectually traumatic experience. Many candidates burn out in the process.

The candidate cannot simply copy what is in other books. That would be plagiarism and a plagiarist faces total disgrace if found out. The PhD candidate has to become totally familiar with the present state of knowledge of the topic by immersing himself or herself in what has been published about it, but in a critical way—questioning previous interpretations and assumptions and re-evaluating the evidence. At the same time, the candidate looks for new evidence or generates new data by experiment. Finally the candidate has to write a book to make all previous books on the topic obsolete.

The topic of a PhD thesis is not as important as the critical thinking skill that is acquired. Its aim is to generate more knowledge about the topic. Whether this results in solving a problem is secondary. It is assumed that by generating more knowledge on a topic, other benefits will follow.

Now and then, an Einstein produces a thesis that revolutionises the state of knowledge of an entire topic, but in most cases, a successful thesis is merely the starting point of a career in disciplined thinking, provided that the new Doctor of Philosophy is employed in a university, a research organization or a think-tank, where he or she can continue to do disciplined thinking.

It is not necessary to have a PhD degree to be a disciplined thinker but for employment in an intellectual or academic position, the PhD has become the normal requirement. But how do we know if PhDs are doing what they are paid to do? The only way is to enforce a publication rule. Under this mechanism, people employed to think have to show proof by publishing their work as ‘papers’ in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-review means that the editor of the journal will send each submitted paper to at least two persons known to be knowledgeable in the topic, for review. The submitted paper is examined like a mini-thesis: it has to be original (not a rehash of previous work), and it must significantly contribute to new understanding of its topic. Only papers that pass peer review get published. A productive average rate of publication for a serious researcher is two papers a year.

Once a paper is published, the title of the paper and its contents, together with the names of the authors and their institutional affiliations (institute and country) are captured in global databases. The papers that attract attention would be referred to ‘in citation’ by other scientists, and all such citations are captured in global databases. This has made it possible to keep track of the number of times each paper is cited after its publication, to provide a measure of the impact that each and every paper makes on the global intellectual community.

By tracking the number of times an author is cited, one can get a measure of the impact that the author has made. Such information is used to analyse the performance of authors. It is often used in making decisions on appointments, salary increments, promotions and terminations.

Scholarly journals are themselves ranked every year by the frequency of citation of the papers they publish. The ranking of journals, usually announced in June, is anxiously awaited by editors to see how they have performed from year to year. Editors strive to improve their journal ratings by imposing higher standards on the papers they publish. It is the editors who enforce and manage the peer-review process.

The body of data on publications and citations, sometimes in combination with other indicators, is also used to rank universities, and such ranking has become an annual global affair.

In 2004, in an interesting and innovative use of publication databases, Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government ranked countries according to their output of scientific papers. He found that 31 countries produced over 97% of the worlds’ output of scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. These are the developed western countries, with USA in the lead. Of the non-western countries, Japan and Russia are prominent in the list. Of developing countries, China, Brazil and India moved into the top 31 recently. China is showing the fastest rate of growth in number of papers published, but in quality, as measured by citation rate, it is still far below USA. Nevertheless, the rise of China, Brazil and India confirms the close linkage between economic growth and scientific performance, first observed in the rise of Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution, followed by the rise of USA, Japan and Russia. The remaining 162 countries—including Malaysia—contributed a combined total of only 2.5% to the growth of scientific activity in the world.

Through the global tracking of publications, made possible by powerful computers, intellectual activity has become open, measurable, and thereby manageable. The main tool of management is the application of the rule “Publish or Perish”. An academic community that has never been subjected to this rule will strongly resist attempts to apply it. This is the challenge that Malaysian institutions face.

Pruning of avocado

2011-10-09T06:11:00.000-07:00

This grafted avocado tree grows in front of my house in Kuala Lumpur. It was planted in June 1997 and first flowered in Mar 2002 but did not produce fruits. It next flowered in May 2003 and produced 55 fruits. Since then it has fruited at unpredictable intervals, roughly once a year, the last time producing 156 fruits. This picture was taken today, 9 Oct 2011. The tree has been kept small by pruning. It is about 12 ft tall and 12 ft in diameter. Without pruning it would have grown to over 30 ft tall and the fruits would have been out of reach. By keeping the tree small, I was able to harvest all the fruits by hand or with a long-handled fruit-picker.

The flowering month varies from year to year: in this case the sequence was Mar 02, Dec 02, Mar 04, Aug 06, Mar 07, Nov 07, Jan 09, Jan 10, Feb 11.

In modern fruit orchards, trees are kept small by pruning so that fruits can be harvested carefully. Any fruit that hits the ground is effectively damaged because the tissues will be bruised at the point of impact.

How a leper settlement, Sungei Buloh, became the horticultural hub of Malaysia

2011-09-28T17:37:00.001-07:00

Gardeners all over Malaysia know of Sungei Buloh as the hub of horticulture in Malaysia. Centred on the grounds of the old Leprosy Hospital and Settlement, Sungei Buloh has, during the past 50 years, become the place to see what is new and available in garden plants.

In the early years of the 20^th Century, lepers were sent into exile in islands such as Pangkor Laut and Pulau Jerejak. In 1930, the Hospital and Settlement in Sungei Buloh were established by the Government of British Malaya to serve as a central facility to treat and house leprosy patients, and the island settlements were gradually closed. Sungei Buloh became one of the largest leper settlements in the world and a centre for research on the treatment of leprosy. The patients lived in simple one-room duplex houses with a bit of land around each house on which they could grow vegetable and keep chickens. The patients and their families had practically no prospects of getting out and reintegrating with society at large.

By the 1950s the doctors were confident that leprosy was treatable and not as infectious as previously thought, but social acceptance of patients posed a huge problem. Then John Wyatt-Smith of the Forest Research Institute (FRI) at Kepong a few miles down the road decided to do something about it. He arranged for about 30 able-bodied men from the settlement to be employed at the Institute. This was no small undertaking. No other organization was willing to offer employment. FRI was able to take the lead because John Wyatt-Smith was such a respected and towering figure at the Institute.

When I joined FRI in 1964, Wyatt-Smith had just retired, but the men from Sungei Buloh had become indispensable. They did all the toughest jobs, moving heavy loads, felling trees, clearing land, and looking after the plant nursery. In the process they earned the respect of their co-workers.

Meanwhile, others in the Settlement were encouraged by the Hospital to take up the growing of ornamental plants, to sell by the roadside in front of their houses. Slowly overcoming their fears, people in Kuala Lumpur began to go to Sungai Buloh to buy plants, because such plants were cheap compared to elsewhere. In the 1960s, the Hospital organised a garden show, in which Lam Peng Sam and I were the judges.

My nurseryman at FRI was Mat Isa bin Bulat. He died a few months ago, by then a highly successful businessman and living in a big bungalow at Sungei Buloh. As a youth in Langkawi, Mat Isa’s world crashed when he was diagnosed with leprosy. Sent to Sungei Buloh for treatment, he was one of those selected to work in FRI. I was at that time making an encyclopedic survey of fruits, seeds and seedling of forest trees. This work would eventually be published in two thick volumes and to become the reference textbook for those in the business of raising forest trees for urban planting. At that time no such business existed.

Mat Isa looked after the hundreds of species of forest trees that I was raising, learning to recognise all the plants and their names. He learnt not only their Malay names but also their scientific names (Greek and Latin to most people) from the labels I attached to the plants. Then one day, he shocked everybody by announcing his resignation, to go into business. Kuala Lumpur was taking up urban greening in a big way and there was a willingness to try new species of trees from the forests. Mat Isa saw his opportunity. He could recognise and name hundreds of species of forest trees by their local as well as their scientific names. He rented land from his neighbours to set up nurseries in Sungei Buloh, and was able to supply the growing demand. I did not know how he was progressing until some years later, when he overtook me on the on road to FRI and waved cheerily. He was driving a Mercedes while I driving my Datsun. On another day, while having a drink with him in a coffee shop he told me how he had just lost a large sum of money. It was stolen from his car when he had stopped for lunch after withdrawing the money to pay salaries. It was something like RM 20,000. ‘Did you report to the police?’ He merely shrugged, ‘What’s the point?’.

Over the years, Sungei Buloh has become the centre of a highly innovative network of self-made men and women engaged in the horticultural business in Malaysia. This network keeps thousands of people employed, not only in Sungei Buloh but also in feeder nurseries outside KL, and as far distant as Cameron Highlands and Muar. New flower varieties are usually first offered in Sungei Buloh before they appear elsewhere.

From its original hub at the hospital area, flower nurseries have been established in the surrounding area. Sungei Buloh provides a good example how the best commercial or industrial hubs come into existence ‘organically’ through time. It requires the interaction of many individuals, in unique ways, in some unique place. Such a hub can be easily destroyed but not easily duplicated elsewhere. As an example of how planned hubs can fall short, we have the so-called ‘green lane’ on the road from the Sungei Buloh junction to the Rubber Research Institute. All along one side of the road, the land has been divided and let out to nurseries, but such nurseries are strung out for several miles, and the road has become a noisy, busy highway. It is unpleasant to walk from one nursery to the next and dangerous to park and re-park on the roadside. It is also impossible to make a U turn. At the historic hospital hub, one can visit a large number of different nurseries within a small area, in peace and quiet.

Now that leprosy and been beaten and its hospital relegated to history, the horticultural hub and its historical buildings, especially the one-room duplex houses, survive as a monument to an ancient and terrifying scourge finally overcome by medical science. There are those eying the hospital land for redevelopment, who have no interest in history nor in the role of Sungei Buloh as the hub of the Malaysian horticulture industry—an industry that, unlike other industries, has been developed by gutsy individuals with little or no political support.

(An earlier version of this article was published in the Star Newspaper on 2 July 2011)

Putrajaya Floria 2011

2011-07-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from Putrajaya after spending the day at this year's Flower Show or Floria 2011. This is the best flower show I have yet seen in Malaysia. It is certainly full of colourful flowers and some designs are finally reaching international standards.

In the evening, at 8 to 10 pm there was a splendid parade of decorated floats on Putrajaya Lake -- a first for Malaysia -- accompanied by fireworks and music. The concept and technology were copied from Soochow, China, and there was a team from Soochow in attendance to see how Malaysia was doing. Pretty good for a first attempt! Fourteen gaily decorated barges took part, sponsored by various states and corporations, including one from Brunei. We were told that one barge tipped over and sank during preparation.

The best time to go is morning when the plants are fresh. In the afternoon many plants are visibly drooping. They perk up again in the evening when it is cooler. Those going in the evening will not regret staying on for the float parade.

The show is for 9 days, which I think is far too ambitious. The plants are all in pots and many of them will have to be replaced from day to day. By the fifth day some of the exhibitors may run out of replacement plants.

The political protests in Kuala Lumpur today may have reduced the number of people at Floria 2011 but even so the car parks were full, and the evening crowd was dense.

Rooftop Secret Garden of 1 Utama under renovation

2011-05-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

The Secret Garden is being renovated part by part so as not to inconvenience visitors. The pathways are being re-surfaced to make them less slippery. At the same time the drainage is being improved for storm water to drain out faster. The big palms are being removed because we are afraid they are getting too heavy for the floor, which is the roof of the shopping mall.

A new free brochure is being designed that will be more informative than the present one.

A new visitor's book will soon be introduced in which visitors will record the time they come to the garden. This will enable us to plan better. Flowers have their times too. Some are morning flowers that fade in the afternoon and several are late afternoon flowers. So far we have favored whole-day flowers. We also prefer plants that flower year round, to give us SPRINGTIME ALL THE TIME. We do not grow night flowers because the garden is not open at night. We are also giving up on plants like petunias that that are quickly destroyed by snails.

The number of visitors average 300 to 400 every weekend. Most visitors are locals. We have just been included in the Ministry of Tourism's new brochure entitled 'Parks and Gardens Trails of Malaysia', which should bring us to the attention of foreign tourists.

If one googles under 'Secret Garden of 1 Utama' one can read about 100 blogs on it. These, together with comments in the visitor's book have provided us with useful guidance.

Canna virus in Malaysia

2011-05-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

Cannas in Malaysia are susceptible to what looks like a viral disease. The symptoms in Malaysia are stunting of plants, patches of dead tissue on young leaves, reduction of flower-size to half the normal size, and progressive stunting and weakening of the clump or bed until no more shoots appear. Separating out the rhizomes and cleaning them before transplanting does not help unless the disease is detected before it has spread to all the rhizomes.

At the early stage of infection, the bed should be dug out and the pieces of rhizome bearing swollen buds separated out for replanting. When new shoots emerge, the plants that are infected can be recognized by dead patches of tissue on their leaves. Such plants should be eliminated immediately, leaving healthy plants for starting new colonies. The virus takes several weeks to spread through a bed of cannas so there is time for such corrective action if one is alert to the symptoms of infection.

The virus does not travel in the air or soil. Plants in the next bed a short distance away may remain free of infection. I think the best way to prevent infection is to remove all canna shoots as soon as they have finished flowering. Such spent shoots should be cut off at their base. A regular once-a-week pruning programme will improve ventilation of the canna bed and deter white flies from settling on the leaves. White flies suck sap and are probably the agents spreading the virus in Malaysia.

In temperate countries, where cannas are sold as rhizomes, the canna virus has been disastrous for the canna trade because it is impossible to tell whether a rhizome is infected until it is grown out. In Malaysia and elsewhere in SE Asia, cannas are sold as full-grown plants, usually flowering, so it is immediately apparent from the condition of the plant whether it is infected.

Availability of the book Tropical Horticulture and Gardening

2011-04-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

The hardcover edition of Tropical Horticulture and Gardening, published by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and listed at RM260, is no longer available. I understand that the stocks were stored in a room that was too hot and humid for book storage. The pages got stuck together, making the books unusable.

I was provided with a number of hardcover copies of the book instead of royalties. Of these, 30 copies are still available. In response to requests, I have arranged to place autographed copies at the Hort Park Nursery in 1 Utama (next to Mamak Corner) to sell at RM 100 each. Hort Park Nursery does not have a place to display books so one may have to ask the shopkeeper, Nizam, where he keeps them.

The manuscript was originally offered to Times Publications to publish but it was politely rejected. I also made approaches to Oxford University Press and Timber Press but they declined.

I then worked with a designer to obtain the tightest possible integration of pictures with text. My aim was to provide maximum useful information in the minimum number of pages, while making every page a visual treat. Normally a designer works to a fixed template and leaves the text alone. By working side by side, the designer and I were able to arrive at a nice design solution for every page, sometimes by adjusting the pictures and sometimes by adjusting the text, making full use of the flexibility and power of modern publishing software to resize and move things around instantly. When everything was ready, I had a complete full colour sample hand-printed and bound, which I took to the Academy of Sciences Malaysia.

The Academy had received a grant from Government for publishing scholarly books. It published the book, but it had no marketing experience. The books stayed in its store room during the two years when it had the marketing rights. When that period was over, I searched for a new publisher. A friend took it to the boss of MPH and that is how the book finally made it to the MPH bookshops as an inexpensive soft-cover edition. All set up costs had already been absorbed by me and the Academy.

Thank you, John and Jacq www.jaycjayc.com and Autumnbelle http://www.mynicegarden.com/ for reviews of the book in your gardening blogs.

Avocados for Kuala Lumpur

2011-04-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

After my blog about avocados in 2007, I have been getting requests for avocado plants that I have found difficult to respond to on a case-by-case basis. Yesterday I made a deal with a retail outlet at the 1 Utama Shopping Mall. This is a small place called Hortpark Nursery on the Lower Ground Floor, next to the Mamak Corner. I have placed two plants there, which are all that I have to spare at present. Hortpark Nursery will take care of them and sell at RM25 per plant to cover their expenses. Hortpark also sells horticarbon in 5 and 10 kg bags. Shoppers should bring bring their own strong bag for big items. Hortpark is open from 10am to about 6pm.

The avocado plants being made available are seedlings from the best plant of about 20 selected clones that I have tested. The clones were acquired by MARDI (Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Centre) through international collaboration many years ago. The Research Assistant in charge of the collection offered me a duplicate set of this collection. I was at that time establishing the Fruit Tree Arboretum at FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia). He brought me a set of bud-grafted plants all the way from MARDI to FRIM, a considerable distance to cover on his motorcycle, at his own expense. This person was about to retire and felt that his many years of effort would disappear without a trace unless he could pass it on. He was right! Avocados have disappeared from MARDI’s agenda.

I planted most of the clones at FRIM, and a few around my house. Over the next 20 years, some of the trees failed to flower and fruit under our conditions. One flowered but never fruited. One remained stunted at about 3 ft tall. One fruited only after 10 years. One produced oversized fruits, but only in small numbers. The collection in FRIM gradually died out after I retired, but I had already identified and propagated the best tree.

This tree fruited at 6 years old and has been fruiting every year. The fruits are smooth-skinned, green in colour, and medium sized (supermarket size), with smooth pulp. It is self-fertile, which means a single tree is enough to produce fruits. This is the tree that I have been propagating and giving away, but I can only produce a small number at a time.

At about the same time as the avocados were offered to me, another scientist, working at an oil palm research centre, Bakasawit, was about to retire to England. He offered me an international collection of coconut varieties that he feared would be lost upon his retirement. Sadly, I had no place for coconuts in FRIM.

Those were times when scientists collaborated across institutions and did what they thought was best in the public interest. That spirit no longer exists.

There are extensive ‘germplasm’ collections of rubber, oil palm, bananas, sweet potatoes, etc in our research institutes, many acquired through exploration and exchange at great cost and effort. All are in danger of being lost upon the retirement of the scientists who built them up, but it is almost impossible for outsiders to get anything out. They are treated like official secrets.

I am working with UTAR at its university campus in Kampar to set up an agricultural resource centre where we hope to establish our own collections for research, teaching, propagation, distribution and exchange. Avocados will be on the agenda, with other fruits and plants of agri-horticultural interest. We hope to establish an ethical model of trust and collaboration between scientists and the public, without which Malaysian agriculture will stagnate.

Fakery versus reality in Malaysia

2011-04-12T05:05:00.000-07:00

The Malaysian Press has been busy during the past few days covering the forthcoming Sarawak State Elections and the news of fake eggs being sold in a market in Penang.

The fake egg issue is the more immediate. A non-government expert on fake eggs, interviewed by the press, has warned that fake eggs are made with chemicals, which are dangerous to health. The Consumers Association of Penang has raised the issue with the government, which responded immediately by sending officers to raid the market and seize hundreds of eggs. After cracking open the eggs, the government experts declared the eggs to be real, but to be doubly sure, they decided to send some of the eggs to the Chemistry Department for DNA tests. The results have not yet been announced. Meanwhile the sale of eggs in Penang has plummeted. To ensure the safety of consumers, the government has declared that it will devise a system to ensure that only certified eggs will reach the market. The Consumers Association alleges that the Government officers confiscated and tested the wrong eggs.

The finger of suspicion has been pointed at the usual suspects--unscrupulous entrepreuners in China, who have already been implicated in faking milk powder, buns, music CDs, Omega watches, Gucci handbags, etc, etc. They seem to have now targeted Malaysia, capitalizing on the inability of Malaysians to distinguish real eggs from clever fakes. If they can fool people in Penang, they can fool people anywhere. The shop keeper from whom I buy eggs is a very worried man because he does not know how to tell a real egg from a clever fake although he has been selling eggs for 50 years. He is thinking of giving up the egg business because DNA sequencing is too high tech for him. It may be easier to sell cameras, but another friend, who sells cameras, says that one has only six months to sell a new model before it is obsoleted by the next model from the same manufacturer. The shelf life of cameras is approaching the shelf life of eggs.

Fake flowers have never been an issue with anybody. But real flowers have posed problems. There was a big scare last year with flowers that allegedly have the power to trigger cancer in people who come near them. Nobody was willing to test the allegation, and the furore seems to have died down.

On the back-burner is the issue of whether the video of an alleged political celebrity filmed in the act with an alleged prostitute is real or fake. The police have checked the video and found it to be real, but nobody is sure whether the celebrity is real. The celebrity in question refuses to cooperate with the police and hand over his DNA. The police are now looking for the alleged prostitute to confirm whether she is real.

To be continued...

Furadan or no furadan, and worm-free gardening

2011-03-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

Furadan (trade name for carbofuran) is used as a contact and systemic poison. Furadan comes in small granules coloured purple or red. It kills earthworms, nematodes, ants, and other animals in the soil by contact. It is also absorbed by roots into the plant, and kills sap-sucking insects such as aphids and mealy bugs; probably leaf-eating caterpillars too.

I have applied furadan to soil to control ants and mealybugs; the ants by contact and the mealybugs by systemic action. The ants were eliminated but came back after one week. Mealybugs were back after two weeks. Hence the poison wears off fairly quickly. On plants growing on the ground, there is a danger of furadan being over-applied by frequent re-application. For plants in pots and containers the use of furadan is more ‘containable’. A light sprinkling of granules on the surface of the soil in the container is enough to rid the soil of earthworms and nematodes. Earthworms are especially lethal in containers used to nurse cuttings or young seedlings, and nematodes destroy the roots and tubers of dahlias. A treated container should be kept out of contact with the ground, so that once treated, the soil it contains will remain free of worms for a very long time. Against ants and sap-sucking insects associated with ants, repeated application may be necessary but in a pot, the furadan will be contained and not get into the ground.

I prefer gardening with soil that is sterile to begin with. Burnt soil (available in bags in Kuala Lumpur at RM1.50 per 3kg bag) is soil that has been baked over a wood fire for about a week. This can be used alone or mixed with biochar/ horticarbon (granulated charcoal, available at RM 10 per 5kg bag). I have no worms in my pots unless I get careless and allow my pots to come into contact with the ground. Worms can enter via the drainage holes at the bottom of the pots.

I do not do any mulching or composting. I find that mulch and compost promote the multiplication of snails, earthworms and termites. In the humid tropics mulch and compost also get soggy as they decompose, impede aeration of the soil, and compete with roots for oxygen. Visitors to the rooftop ‘Secret Garden of 1 Utama’ may have noticed that it is free of mulch and compost. All the garden trimmings are stuffed into big bags and sent down by lift for disposal elsewhere.

The role of earthworms in the humid tropics needs more investigation. Many years ago I assigned a young scientist to study earthworms in the Malaysia forests and guess what? He could not find any! It seems that earthworms are rare in tropical rain forests. I suspect the earthworms in our farms and gardens are of foreign origin. The breakdown of litter in the forests is done by insects, especially termites, not by worms.

Earthworms kill potted plants

2011-02-06T02:50:00.000-08:00

For a long time, I have suspected that earthworms kill potted plants by feeding on their roots. Whenever I cleaned out such pots, I found earthworms in them.

Ever since Charles Darwin wrote of the earthworm in 1881, “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures”, few have dared to say anything nasty about earthworms, so I kept my suspicions to myself while trying to figure how I could prove my case.

As a scientist I am aware that to prove cause and effect, I would have to set up a comparison between two potted plants in which everything would have to be identical except that one pot would contain worms while the other would have no worms. However, with just two pots for comparison, the results could be muddled up by unknown variations despite efforts to ensure absolute uniformity. It would be better to enlarge the comparison to say 20 pots per treatment. Comparing 20 pots against 20 would be statistically more robust than 1 against 1. I still had to figure out how to measure plant performance and for how long to run the experiment. Things got so complicated in my mind that the experiment never got done.

Last year, I raised half a dozen seedlings of the rare endemic Malayan witch hazel, Maingaya malayana, in individual pots. The seedlings grew at different rates, which was to be expected since they were raised from seeds and could be expected to be genetically different from each other. I had also not taken the trouble to ensure that the soil was exactly the same in all the pots. Also the pots were in different parts of the garden, under different environments. However, one plant was particularly stunted. I thought this was a genetic dwarf because it did not respond to any of my efforts to get it to grow beyond its first few leaves. Finally when it was clear that the plant was about to die, I tipped the plant out of the pot and found earthworms wriggling in the soil. I threw out the earthworms and repotted the plant. It recovered immediately and produced new leaves. The recovery was so striking that I have no doubt the worms were the cause of the stunting and slow decline of the plant.

For those who still doubt, I can now suggest an easy test. Add earthworms to a pot containing a healthy plant. Watch the plant decline over the next few months, then repot the plant after removing the worms, and see if the plant recovers.

Ministry of Tourism to upgrade Malaysia's Parks and Gardens

2011-01-16T16:32:00.000-08:00

The Minister of Tourism, Ng Yen Yen, who is a very keen gardener, has decided to use tourism to drive the upgrading of parks and gardens in Malaysia. In August 2010 the Ministry appointed me as Consultant for Parks and Gardens. Since then I have been involved in many site visits and meetings.

My first task was a 'hot potato': to steer the redevelopment of the Water Mall at the Penang Botanic Gardens into a water garden. The grant money had been spend on poorly conceived structures, as a result of which public opinion had turned negative. The Ministry was stung and I had only six months to redevelop the area using the small amount of money left. I hope by June this year to have Victoria lilies and other water plants fully established, and to have a respectable water garden on show.

Next are public gardens in Malacca, Fraser's Hill, Cameron Highlands and Raub to be upgraded. I hear there still others in the pipeline.

I hope, during my tenure, to get botanists appointed to take charge of the botanic gardens. We now have public 'botanic gardens' in Penang, Malacca, and Kuala Lumpur that are only botanic in name. With no botanists in charge there are no programmes for research, conservation, interpretation or education.

I also want to establish apprentice training schemes for gardeners so as to upgrade gardening as a creative profession.

A touch of Guilin at The Haven in Ipoh

2011-01-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

I grew up in Ipoh where the landscape is dominated by limestone hills known as karst. As a boy scout, I spent over 100 nights camping out in Tambun at the edge of Ipoh, close to an elongated karst formation that we named the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ because of its curvaceous reclining silhouette. According to geologist Barnard Pearson, the karst of Ipoh and the Kinta Valley are parts of a super limestone formation stretching from South China (Guilin) through Indochina and Thailand (Phuket) into Malaysia. The limestone was deposited at the bottom of the sea over 200 million years ago, as shells of marine animals. When the Indian landmass collided with and merged with Eurasia 45 million years ago,the Himalayas were pushed up by the frontal impact, while the sea floor to the south-east, with its limestone beds, was pushed up as collateral effects. The uplifted limestone then began to erode because of the mildly corrosive action of carbon dioxide dissolved in rainwater. As rainwater percolated through cracks in the limestone it formed caves that got bigger and bigger as their sides slowly dissolved away. Eventually the caves got so big that their roofs fell in, leaving the side walls as vertical cliffs. However, perhaps because of tropical weathering, the karst formations in Malaysia are more rounded than those at Guilin.

The karst formations have a unique flora. When I became a professional botanist,I returned to Ipoh to explore this flora. One of my treasured finds was Isonandra perakensis, a small tree with copper-coloured leaves, on the top of a hill that I had climbed as boy. This species was first discovered in the 19th Century and had not been seen again until I rediscovered it.

There is now at Tambun a classy new condominium development called The Haven, the central feature of which is a karst formation rising 140 ft high from a lake of crystal clear water. The water in the lake wells up from a natural spring. Three blocks of condominiums are being built on one side of the lake, on what was formerly a fruit and vegetable farm. On the other side of the lake is a massive karst formation rising up to 1400 ft. With binoculars, I could make out Cycas, orchids and other unique plants on the sheer cliffs. I stayed one night in the show house and enjoyed the cool night breeze on a balcony overlooking the lake. Early next morning I led a small group to the base of the limestone massif and we were soon in the middle of a large patch of flowering wild gingers. The developer, Superboom, has spared no effort to conserve the karst vegetation and the lake. The Haven is a first class development befitting a first class location.

I would like to see the karst formations in the Kinta Valley protected and cherished as in Guilin, but whereas Guilin is the centre of a booming tourist industry that ensures the protection of its superb scenery, Ipoh has failed to attract sustained investment interest. Indeed, the Kinta Valley has been suffering a severe and continuous drain of young and energetic people for the past 50 years. Of my own classmates only two went back to make careers in Ipoh. I think it is inevitable that youth and energy will move to where new opportunities are actively created. Developments such as the Haven will bring new people, new money and new ideas to Ipoh and the Kinta Valley. Already the development of The Haven has stirred intense debate in Ipoh about Ipoh. In Kuala Lumpur, where a new property development is launched every month, one hardly notices the continuous building and rebuilding. Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur are two hours apart by car but 50 years apart in other matters.

Horticultural carbon now available for home gardens

2010-12-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

Good news for those who would like to try horticultural carbon for home gardening! Horticarbon is now available in 5kg and 10kg bags at 10 and 18 Malaysian ringgit respectively, at the new plant shop at the 1 Utama Shopping Mall.

From the Rain Forest at 1 Utama, go out onto the service road, walk under the bridge and the place is to the right.

Horticultural carbon is charcoal made of compressed sawdust and graded in two sizes: 1-5mm and 5-12mm. It used to be available only in half-ton bags that needed four men to lift. The new packing is more convenient. This is essentially the same as BIOCHAR.
Those who need more information can find it my earlier blogs. Also by googling biochar or horticultural carbon.

A Roberto Burle Marx garden in Kuala Lumpur

2010-08-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Picasso of landscape architecture, Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) designed the Central Park of the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC)shortly before he died.

Roberto Burle Marx, a Brazilian, created gardens like abstract paintings, using native plants to create blocks of colour. Here are a few scenes at the park, which is actually on top of the enormous underground car park of the iconic Twin Towers of Kuala Lumpur. Judging from pictures of Roberto’s other gardens around the world, I think his garden in Kuala Lumpur would easily rank as one of his best works.

Living with poisonous plants

2010-06-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was interviewed by a Chinese language newspaper (Nanyang Siang Pau) on the subject of poisonous plants. There has been a spate of emails and sms messages saying that this or that popular house plant is poisonous and even cancer-inducing. As a result worried people have been throwing out their house plants. After the two- hour interview, I wrote a summary in English and sent it to the reporter to help her. Since I do not read Chinese, I have no idea what will finally appear in the Chinese press, but I thought my English summary might be of interest to blog readers.

Plants cannot run, fight or hide, so they make themselves inedible with poisons, otherwise they would get completely eaten up and become extinct. Animals that live on plants have some degree of resistance to plant poisons, but humans mostly lack such resistance. Salad plants have been selected and grown for their lack of poisons but such plants cannot survive on their own without human protection.

Some plant poisons act by contact. The most notorious are those of the poison ivy family which cause irritation in contact with bare skin. People learn to avoid touching these plants after one experience.

The most common plant poisons are tannins. Tannins react with proteins and are used to convert the perishable protein in animal skins into tough durable leather. Tannin will similarly react with the skin of the mouth and throat. Plants that contain tannins in large amounts are impossible to eat. Just try raw bananas or raw persimmons! When fruits ripen, their tannin content is deactivated to allow animals to eat the fruits and disperse the seeds. In dilute amounts, tannin is what gives taste to beer, wine and tea.

The next most common poison is calcium oxalate in the form of sharp microscopic crystals in the plant cells. When these cells are broken in the mouth, the crystals embed themselves in skin of the mouth and throat and cause swelling. The aptly named ‘dumb cane’ and other members of its family such as the popular ‘money plant’, as well as the ‘ZZ plant’ Zamiocalcus zamiifolia (marketed as a Chinese good luck plant), contain such crystals. Kids that put a leaf containing oxalate crystals in their mouths will learn never to put unknown plants into their mouths ever again, but it may be hours before the pain and swelling passes.

Then there are the plants that contain cyanide compounds, especially those in the tapioca (cassava) family that includes the ‘sweet leaf’ (sayur manis or Sabah vegetable). These poisons are totally inactivated by cooking. There was a case in Taiwan of death from eating raw ‘sweet leaf’, that caused a panic and a sharp drop in consumption of this popular vegetable when reported in the press. The person who consumed the raw leaves had done so deliberately in the belief that it would help her lose weight.

Finally there are the plants that contain alkaloids and other chemicals that can cause convulsions, breathing problems, nervous disorders, hallucinations or kidney failure. These plants are used to kill e.g. to tip arrows and darts for hunting and warfare, for execution (e.g. the famous case of Socrates who was executed with a drink of hemlock juice), for murder (when disguised as food) or suicide. Also to kill pain and give pleasure (e.g. opium). Many of these plants are used as medicines in small dosages.

Cases of accidental fatal poisoning by eating poisonous plants are extremely rare. The one case that everybody quotes is the deadly nightshade in Europe that has juicy delicious-looking but poisonous fruits. Because tomatoes resemble the deadly nightshade and belong to the same family, it took a very long time before Europeans would accept tomatoes as food after their introduction from the Americas.

In brief, fatal poisoning by accidental consumption of poisonous plants is almost impossible because poisonous plants are so unpleasant to eat and the human mouth is so sensitive to unpalatable substances. All the worry about poisonous plants is unnecessary.

Camellia japonica flowering in KL

2010-05-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Camellias flower all year on the highland resorts of Malaysia but not in the lowlands. I have tried for years to grow camellias in Kuala Lumpur, in sun as well as in shade, but even if they formed flower buds, the buds would dry up and abort without blooming. It has been terribly frustrating. Finally, one plant has flowered, after three years in a pot, under the shade of a langsat tree. The first flower, about 3 months ago, might have been a fluke. Now the plant is bearing its third flower, indicating that some barrier has been broken. Now we know it can be done, we can try harder to add camillias to our lowland gardens.

Dipterocarpus alatus--iconic giant street tree of Ho Chi Minh City

2010-05-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

I visited Ho Chi Minh City recently and was amazed to see giant trees of Dipterocarpus alalus growing as street trees in the older parts of the city. I estimate their age to be 80 to 100 years, which means they would have been planted during French colonial rule. Dipterocarpus alatus belongs to Dipterocarpaceae, which is the dominant timber-tree family of SE Asia. Dipterocarpus alatus itself is native to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Philippines.

In Malaysia and Singapore two other members of the family have been planted as street trees in the past 10 - 20 years. These are Hopea odorata (also commonly planted in Vietnam) and Shorea roxburghii. Both are doing well as street trees and will eventually become giants.

Which passionflower is this?

2010-02-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

I bought this plant in a Sungei Buloh nursery two years ago and it has been flowering in the Secret
Garden of 1 Utama. Could this be Passiflora amethystina? It does not fruit and the flowers are not perfumed. The leaves are deeply trilobed.

Is this a cycad?

2010-01-15T21:25:00.000-08:00

Does anybody recognize this plant? I bought several small seedlings about two years ago from a retail outlet located in the shopping mall of 1 Utama and planted them in the Secret Garden on the roof. The plants grew and produced bulbous stems topped with closely clustered pinnate leaves. They look like cycads but I have not been able to identify them. The species has meanwhile disappeared from the market. This seems rather typical of the Malaysia horticultural market--somebody brings in one batch of plants (in this case probably as seeds), sells the lot, and moves on to something else. Some introductions persist while others fade out. This one may persist.

What monocot is this? Agavaceae

2009-12-31T22:39:00.000-08:00

This plant has been in the Secret Garden of 1 Utama for several years. It came as tufted plants with stiff sharply pointed leaves. I planted one tuft in the cactus bed with other plants of arid climates because it looked like an agave. I planted another in a wet place. The plants thrived in both places but surprisingly it was the plant in the wet place that flowered. It produced a long slender inflorescence bearing a series of flowers, but failed to set fruits. The identity of the plant is a mystery. A friend has suggested Bromeliaceae, the pineapple family, but I think it is closer to Agavaceae the century-plant family.

Which Crinum lily is this?

2009-12-14T18:02:00.000-08:00

This crinum lily was growing in a friend's garden at about 1000 m elevation at Genting Highlands near Kuala Lumpur where the climate is noticeably cooler than in Kuala Lumpur. I transferred some bulbs to the Secret Garden of 1 Utama (climatically in the lowlands, at about 100 m elevation), where it grows and flowers regularly, but whereas in the highlands the flowers open fully and face sideways, in 1 Utama they open less widely and face downwards. I thought this might be Crinum kirkii but the inflorescence stalk is long and carries the flower head way above the rather short cluster of leaves.

Solanaceae - Browallia?

2009-12-13T06:27:00.000-08:00

This is a flowering creeper I found in a nursery in Bidor about two years ago. It flowers freely and is quite vigorous. The leaves are rough to touch. The plant does not produce any fruits, so it cannot be native to Malaysia. My guess is that it belongs to the family Solanaceae because the flowers remind of Browallia.

Tulip gentian, Eustoma gandiflorum, now in Kuala Lumpur

2009-11-03T06:38:00.000-08:00

Here goes! My first attempt to put a picture in my blog, following the advice of Autumn Belle.

This plant appeared in a nursery in Sg Buloh last month. The flower looks like a rose but the leaves are simple and opposite. After searching in the botanical literature I narrowed the options down to the family Gentianaceae. Sure enough it turned out to be the 'tulip gentian' a species ranging from Southern USA to the northern part of S. America. It should thrive in Malaysia. The flowers come in a range of colours.

New horticultural plants in Malaysia

2009-10-11T05:57:00.000-07:00

I make it a habit to regularly visit plant retail nurseries in Sungei Buloh at the northeastern edge of Kuala Lumpur to look for new plants. Every month there is something new. I buy the new plants to test in my various projects. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they fade away. The amazing thing is that new things keep coming in, and usually without any name.

What I would like to do in my blog is to feature new plants as I find them so as to build up a record of their appearance in the local market. I hope these pictures will prompt colleagues to provide identifications and clues about the origins of these plants.

I have not yet learnt how to post pictures in my blogs but this will be rectified in December when my son will be in KL to help me. In the meantime I have upgraded my access to broadband and my son has put a picture of myself in my profile.

Growing Papilionanthe hookeriana, the Kinta Orchid

2009-09-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Kinta Orchid used to be so common that it was called the Kinta Weed. It used to thrive in the ponds created by tin-mining activities in the Kinta Valley. Now it is rarely seen in the wild. In nature it was associated with floating islands of aquatic vegetation formed by Hanguana malayana, a monocot with erect clusters of large leaves 1 m or more tall. The orchid has long slender stems and these stems were supported by the leaves of the Hanguana. The orchid inflorences would emerge when the orchid stems were about level with the tips of the Hanguana leaves.

In cultivation, Papilionanthe ochids including 'Miss Joachim' the national flower of Singapore, is tied to wooden posts. I have done this with the Kinta orchid, using posts 7 ft tall. However, the orchids, now 4 - 5 ft tall, are not flowering. I wonder if they need to overtop their supporting posts before they will flower. Does anybody have experience with this?

I am growing these orchids on the 30,000 sq ft rooftop Secret Garden of 1 Utama. The garden is open Saturdays and Sundays 10 am to 6 pm. Entrance is free. Yesterday I conducted a tour for a visiting group of Canadian garden feature writers and publishers, and they were very impressed. Canadians have probably the best gardens in the world, in Vancouver, so if Canadian garden feature writers say they are impressed, we have reason to celebrate.

Oil palm solution to trans-boundary haze in SE Asia?

2009-07-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

This July has been a bad month for people subjected to trans-boundary haze from Indonesia. I have had to take antihistamines on the days that I spend outdoors. Otherwise the eyes get itchy, the throat dry, the nose runny and the body feverish. Last night it rained heavily and today I had my first good day in almost a month.

All those negotiations to get Indonesia to ban the burning of forests have taken us nowhere.

If you do not identify the problem, how can you solve it? The problem is that the burning is not by loggers and not by oil palm growers. Timber and oil palm companies are big targets that can be easily stopped. The burning is by hundreds of thousands of rural peasant-farmers who cannot be stopped. What is being burnt is not forest, but secondary growth. The western NGOs play their role in this charade by blaming the loggers and oil palm community, I suspect because such NGOs have other agendas. The Indonesian Government is happy to play along because the reality is beyond their power to control.

In Kalimantan, where many Javanese were settled in large immigrant communities 20-30 years ago, their children have grown up and spread out to claim land of their own. Everywhere except in the Dayak heartland close to the Sabah-Brunei border, the children of the settlers have cleared land for themselves, far in excess of what they can cultivate. To maintain their claim to the land that they have staked out, they burn the vegetation every year when it is dry enough to do so. I am told they hang on to land in the hope that someday they can sell it to an oil palm plantation company. So the annual burning has become a ritual that nobody can figure out how to stop. It is probably the same in Sumatra though I have not been there in the dry season. You have to take a drive through South and East Kalimantan during the dry season to experience the vastness of the scale of burning. It is quite safe to drive because although the fires extend mile after mile after mile, and burn right up to the roadside, the burning vegetation is low. These are not life-threatening fires like those in Australia that race through high forest. The people who start the fires continue to live there surrounded by their fires, and cannot figure out why the rest of the world should worry.

The only thing that can stop the annual burning is when all this annually burnt land (and peat, in the case of coastal areas) is bought up and planted with oil palm. The tropical rain forest is already gone. Let’s start healing the earth.

Rating of forest canopy walkways: 4 stars for Sepilok

2009-06-30T17:23:00.000-07:00

I visited the canopy walkway in the Sepilok Forest Discovery Centre in Sandakan last week. The experience is so different from my first walkway, in the 1960’s, that I am moved to attempt a rating of the canopy walkways I have seen in Malaysia.

My first walkway was constructed by local jungle people, the Orang Asli, in Bukit Lanjan forest at the edge of Kuala Lumpur, under the supervision of US Army medical officers. The US team was based at Malaysia’s Institute for Medical Research during the duration of the Vietnam War to study animal-borne diseases that could affect troops in tropical rain forests. While the medical personnel screened the animals of the canopy, I worked on the trees. The walkway was improvised with aluminium ladders for walking upon, suspended by a system of ropes anchored to big trees. The walkway swayed and bounced with every step and one had to keep a firm hand on the ropes to avoid falling out. Whenever an anchor tree died, the walkway had to be realigned through a different set of trees. This interfered with long-term observations on canopy trees. I give the Bukit Lanjan walkway a one-star rating. It no longer exists.

The Bukit Lanjan canopy walkway may have been the first in the tropics. Subsequent walkways have been built with tourists in mind, and the sides are netted so that people cannot fall out by accident.

The Sepilok walkway merits a 4-star rating. It is absolutely steady, on permanent supports of steel and concrete. The work has been done very carefully, with no noticeable damage to the trees and forest. This walkway will not require shifting and is ideal for long-term studies of the forest from permanent vantage points. The walkways are steady enough to ride a motorbike on, and to support camera tripods for time-lapse photography. The forest is truly magnificent for its big trees and diversity of species. At present, users walk to the end and have to come back the same way, but when the last lap is completed, users will do a full circuit. When that happens, the walkway will deserve a 5-star rating.

The walkway at the Belian Camp in the Maliau Basin in Sabah merits a 3-star rating. The walkway is anchored on big trees, but the construction could have been better. The barks of the anchor trees show some signs of damage. Users reaching the end have to come back the same way and there are no plans for a one-way circuit.

The walkway at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia in Kepong also merits a 3-star rating. It is anchored on big trees. The anchoring has been done carefully, with no damage to the trees. Traffic flow proceeds in a single direction. The walkway gets a 3-star rating because although the forest is great, it is not as magnificent as in Sepilok or Maliau.

The walkway on Penang Hill merits 2-stars. It is anchored on trees, and users proceed in a single direction. The forest is a unique coastal hill forest of Shorea curtisii. It gets two stars because the species diversity is low compared to the other sites.

Horticulture in Myanmar

2009-06-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a 5 day tour of Myanmar, during which we visited Yangon (Rangoon), Mandalay and Bagan (Pagan). It was a sightseeing tour, and the sights were worth it. Some of the temples are, in their own way, as impressive as St Peter's in Rome. The roads and hotels are excellent; the people are friendly; street crime is virtually unknown; and the towns, villages and markets are free of rubbish. The vendors do not try to cheat foreigners. We did not see any armed military or police personnel anywhere.

The extent of poverty is high. On our flight back to Malaysia, the plane was filled with young men and women coming to Malaysia to work. They were shabbily dressed, did not know how to use the toilets, and had not bathed for several days. Curiously, on our way there, the plane had been full of returning workers but we had hardly noticed them. They had obviously been changed by their stay in Malaysia.

Horticulturally, the country is still in the 1950s. Almost all the garden plants are old varieties from the colonial period and the diversity is small. For example the most common variety of hibiscus is the variety that Malaysia chose as its national flower in 1957. This variety is now uncommon in Malaysia because of replacement by new imported hybrids. Still, it was nice to see some old garden plants that I have not seen for years.

The countryside in Pagon is semi-arid savannah, with trees spaced out instead of forming a closed forest. Here most of the trees belong to just a few species, notably neem, tamarind, Acacia leucophloea and Borassus flabellifer (commonly known in Thailand and Malaysia as 'sea coconut' though it has nothing to do with the sea and is not a coconut). In Myanmar, the fan-shaped leaves of Borassus are used as thatch for roofing, the inflorescences are tapped for its sugary juice to make a fermented drink, and the fruits are harvested for food. In olden times, Myanmar was part of the 'palm culture' of South and Southeast Asia, in which written records were made on the leaves of Borassus cut into strips and inscribed using a sharp stylus. The strips were sewn into books for safe keeping.

The women in the villages and countryside are in the habit of painting their faces with a yellowish powder made by grinding the bark of Limonia accidissima on a stone surface.

Those wishing to visit Myanmar should be aware that credit cards are useless because of the US and European trade embargo. You need to carry cash in US dollars. One USD can be changed in hotels for 1000 Kyats (pronouced 'Jets' because K is silent and y is pronounced as j). The banks offer only 450 Kyats for 1 USD. Only clean USD notes are accepted. Soiled or torn or faded notes are not accepted.

Horticultural carbon, terra preta and high performance horticulture in the humid tropics

2009-05-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have received many enquiries about the horticultural carbon that I use to create the rooftop 'Secret Garden of 1 Utama'. To make it easier to deal with queries, I have prepared the following account, to be published in a journal. Please bear with the stiff format and language, which is a journal requirement.

Introduction
Soils in the humid tropics tend to be highly clayey. Clay particles stick together to impede passage of water and air, and this is detrimental to root growth. Without sustained effort keep clay soils open and porous, tropical soils rapidly become unproductive. Growers resort to many different methods of farming on clayey soils. For example, vegetable growers till the soil after each harvest and pile up the loosened soil to form raised beds. During each watering session, water soaks in and drains out easily, thereby simultaneously renewing the supply of water and air in the soil. A good soil is analogous to lung tissue in that both have large internal surfaces to hold moisture and air. Unfortunately the effect of tilling lasts only for a few months.

Clay soil may be burnt over a hot fire, in the process of which it becomes crumbly (Holttum 1953). Burnt soil maintains its crumbly structure for up to one year, and such soil is often used for container gardening.

However, the most favoured soil for horticulture is garden black soil, which goes by the Malay name of tanah hitam (black soil). Black soil originated in household backyards where domestic waste was dumped and periodically burnt. The black colour was due to the accumulation of charcoal and soot in the soil over time.

Tanah hitam in Malaysia seems to be very similar the soil in the Amazon known in Portuguese as terra preta (black earth). Terra preta soils are very fertile and contain a high content of carbon (about 10%). They occur on sites that appear to have been permanent native settlements for centuries before their populations were wiped out by diseases brought in by the Europeans. It would have taken centuries of firewood burning on the same sites to have produced black soil in the vast quantities, to 2 m deep in some sites. The discovery of terra preta sites has created a lot of discussion in the Internet about its origin.

The development of horticultural carbon
Open burning has been prohibited for many years in Malaysia, hence black soil is no longer available. Needing a large volume of good soil to establish a rain forest in the ‘1 Utama’ shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, I decided to make such a soil by mixing charcoal particles with soil. We made this soil by mixing normal clayey soil (mostly subsoil) with charcoal and coconut fibre in equal proportions by volume. The charcoal was conventional charcoal produced by the kilning of mangrove wood. This came in large hard pieces that had to be broken up mechanically. The resulting particles were irregular in size and difficult to mix with the clay and fibre. I then found a much better source of charcoal in the factory of a charcoal briquette manufacturer. Charcoal briquettes are made by compressing sawdust into standard-size briquettes for kilning. The briquettes, meant for the barbecue market, can be easily broken into particles, sieved to remove dust and graded into the desired sizes. We refer to the product as horticultural carbon (Ng, 2006). We use two sizes: 1 – 4 mm particles for potting mixtures and 5 – 12 mm for garden beds.

We have found that a mixture of equal parts horticultural carbon and clay soil is good for general purpose horticulture. A mixture of three parts carbon to one part soil is better for cacti and succulents that need exceptionally well-drained soil.

Horticultural carbon is half the weight of soil, so the mixtures we make are lighter and more porous than ordinary garden soil. The reduction in weight was an important factor in my next project, a garden on the roof of the same shopping mall, seven floors above the ground. This garden, known as the Secret Garden of 1 Utama is now open to the public at weekends.

The porosity of soil mixed with horticultural carbon greatly reduces the labour of weeding because the weeds can be pulled out easily. However horticultural carbon only holds half the amount of water that an equivalent mass of clay soil will hold. Its lower water-holding capacity, together with its porosity, means that horticultural carbon dries out much faster than clay soils. The drying of the soil medium can be very damaging to the roots of plants, hence we find it necessary to keep our medium kept moist all the time. This can be arranged in various ways, for example, by watering twice a day. In pots, we would recommend placing the pots on shallow trays to hold water.

Horticultural carbon does not contain nutrients, hence fertilizers have to be applied regularly.

Initially the carbon and clay particles remain separate though mixed. Gradually the carbon wears down and becomes integrated with the clay, with consequent settling of the soil mixture. The soil level drops and is topped up with pure carbon.

The performance of plants on horticultural carbon
Our most extreme experiment was to grow rice on 100% horticultural carbon in plastic basins. The basins, about 20 cm deep, were three-quarters filled with carbon particles and topped up with water. Rice seeds were sown direct on the surface. Our Indonesian workers, rice-growers in their former lives, all had a good laugh because “everybody knows that rice only grows on tanah liat (sticky clay soil)”. Well, our rice grew and produced a heavy crop of grains. We have now grown three successive crops. The roots form very dense mats. After each crop, the roots have to be dried out before the carbon particles can be shaken out and recovered..

For cacti and succulents, we use a mix of 75% carbon to 25% burnt soil in elevated beds. Some species thrive, but some still find it too wet, and rot when it rains daily. Nevertheless ours is the only decent-looking cactus bed exposed to tropical rain in Kuala Lumpur.

Begonias, calatheas, and aglaonemas grow well in 50:50 mixes on raised beds provided 50 - 75% of the sunlight is cut off using shade-nets.

Of temperate plants and montane plants, we have managed to grow apple, peach, plum, Magnolia grandiflora, Magnolia liliiflora, arabica coffee, azalea, camellia, day lilies and Platanus. It has been hypothesized that in the tropics, the high night-time temperatures raise the night-time respiration rate to a level that temperate plants cannot adapt to. We think a high carbon mix allows air (oxygen) to get to the roots more easily, making it easier for temperate plants to adapt. However the flowering patterns of temperate plants are disrupted by the lack of seasons. Some species do not flower at all (e.g. day lilies), some flower infrequently and sparingly (e.g. apple and plum), and some flower all through the year (e.g. Magnolia liliiflora and arabica coffee).

Where to see horticultural carbon in use
In Malaysia, the Secret Garden of 1 Utama in Petaling Jaya, occupying 0.25 ha of flat roof top 7 floors above the ground, is the largest display open to public view. Here are grown over 500 species of plants, including palms, orchids, temperate plants, flowers, spices, rice, cacti, climbers and grasses. Also in 1 Utama but on the lower ground floor, is a rainforest with some 50 species of timber trees growing on a horticultural carbon mixture. In Sarawak, the Laila Taib Ethno Garden of the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre at Semengok, Kuching, displays a good range of native herbs grown on horticultural carbon, most of them larger and healthier than in their original rain forest habitats.

Horticultural carbon in carbon sequestration
Since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased significantly, to bring about global warming. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due partly to the extraction and burning of coal and petroleum and partly to the clearing of forests, which reduces the amount of organic carbon stored in forests.

Proposed measures to control global warming include reduction in consumption of coal and petroleum and the planting of trees and forest to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic carbon. However, reduction in consumption has proven to be difficult, and trees and forests fix carbon efficiently only when they are in active growth, i.e. during their juvenile phase. When trees die, organic carbon is converted back to carbon dioxide through the normal processes of decay.

The conversion of wood to charcoal fixes carbon more permanently and the use of such carbon as a horticultural medium kills two birds with one stone. Horticultural carbon acts as a carbon store but instead of being just a passive store, its use as a high performance horticultural medium helps to solve the other global problem, of increasing food production in the world. On our roof top garden the average use of horticultural carbon is 1 tonne (equivalent to a volume of 2 m3 ) to cover 6m2 of floor area. Our manufacturer of horticultural carbon is yoltan@tm.net.my

References
Holttum, R.E. 1053. Gardening in the Lowlands of Malaya. Staits Times Press, Singapore.
Ng, F.S.P. 2006. Tropical Horticulture and Gardening. Clearwater Publications, Kuala Lumpur.

Tropical rooftop garden reviewed

2009-04-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Secret Garden of One Utama, situated on the roof of a seven-floor shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur and occupying one quarter of a hectare, has received rave reviews in the Malaysian press. It got one full page in the Star, one full page in Sin Chew News, and a half page in Guang Ming News. The New Straits Times feature will appear shortly and a video will also be made available in the New Straits Times website.

We found that different visitors had different interests, so our strategy of providing a variety of themes turned out to be correct. The themes are (1)temperate plants (2)desert plant (3)tropical climbers (4)food plants (5)flowers (6)colourful foliage and (7)iconic plants.

The garden is different from Eden in Cornwall in that it is not covered. The whole garden is exposed to tropical temperature and rain.

With this experience and our experience in growing a tropical rain forest within a shopping mall, we are now ready to design a roofed structure that will house an integrated combination of forest, garden, shopping and dining. The vegetation can be fully tropical but the temperature and light can be maintained at more comfortable levels.

High-tech tropical garden in Malaysia now open to public

2009-04-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

The Secret Garden of One Utama was opened to the public today at a special launching ceremony by Dato C.K. Teo. This garden is on the rooftop of the 'One Utama' shopping mall in Petaling Jaya and is the largest rooftop garden in SE Asia. It uses novel technologies like granulated carbon as the soil medium and a chilled water delivery system at night. Over 500 species are grown here including many that one would not expect to see in the tropical lowlands, like apple, plum, magnolia and arabica coffee. Also cacti, olives and other dry climate plants. Also staples like rice and sorghum, and spices like pepper, ginger, clove and nutmeg. And lots of flowers in bloom. The garden took over three years to develop. Situated on top of a 7 floor building, its development has been a well-kept secret.

Entrance is free. The garden is open on Saturdays and Sundays at 10 am to 6 pm. Visitors have to obtain a free pass from the reception counter. Only 100 passes are issued per hour.

The press was present in force at the launching and I have never seen reporters and press photographers in such a state of excitement. The Patron and the President of the Selangor Gardening Society and senior members of the landscape profession were amazed by what they saw. I have to stop here so as not to give any more secrets away.

Gobal recession affects garbage disposal

2009-03-15T17:08:00.000-07:00

The old newpapers in my house have been piling up during the past few weeks. Then it hit me that the people who come around collecting old newspapers have stopped making their rounds. This must be because the recycling factories have been hit by the recession.

At the peak of the economic bubble last year, thieves went on a rampage, stealing metal signboards, manhole covers and electric cables. When the bubble burst, the thievery stopped, and that was a good thing. Now, the recession is likely to become environmentally ominous, with old newsprint, plastic, glass and other recyclable things uncollected and filling up the dumpsites.

Governments have announced plans to boost the economy. Most of the money will go to the glamour industries. How about supporting the recyclers and garbage collectors to stay in business? They are perhaps as important as banks and motocar manufacturers.

David Fairchild and the UN Convention on Biodiversity

2009-02-20T07:44:00.000-08:00

Earlier this month I traveled to Miami to receive the David Fairchild Medal for plant exploration. On the long trip, I had time to think about the legacy of David Fairchild and other plant explorers.

Plant explorers have been responsible for the internationalization of many of the plants that we use for food, flowers, medicines and other natural products. Just think what life would be like if, in the year 1492, international law had made it impossible to take plants from one place to another without first agreeing with local authorities to pay royalties in perpetuity for plants taken out of their lands. Perhaps eighty percent of all the food that city people eat, and most of the plants that farmers and gardeners grow, would be deleted, for such is our dependence worldwide on the sharing of plant genetic resources. Almost nobody is free from such dependence. There would be total legal gridlock over who to pay, how much, and to whom.

Before the UN Convention on Biodiversity, genetic resources were considered the common resource of humankind. This principle was rejected at the Convention, and biodiversity became the property of nations. In Malaysia, the nation is a federation of component states, so the individual states have laid claim to ‘their biodiversity’. Within the state of Sarawak, the tribal communities of the interior now have the idea that they own the germplasm on their tribal lands. Within the tribal communities, adjacent villages are now concerned about which plants in the forest belong to which community.

All this began with US Court decisions allowing the patenting (in effect, grants of ownership) of biological materials. Since then, we have been sliding down a slippery slope. In the US, they say patents are necessary to promote investment in research and development. In the developing countries, they think money will be made in royalties or rents from the sale of rights to access their biodiversity.

Before boarding my flight to the US I bought a copy of Newsweek. In it was an article on how the development of new medicines has been stymied by the dense thicket of patents in the way. The big pharmaceutical companies have found it impossible to negotiate though such thickets. Goodbye to major advances in drug discovery!

This reminded me of a conference in Kuching that I attended recently, at which a representative of Bioversity (the international organization that promotes the conservation of agricultural biodiversity), said that international plant breeding work has come almost to a standstill. Plant breeding requires the use of breeding stocks of diverse origins, and nobody wants the hassle of negotiating with multiple claimants for the right to use breeding materials. The Green Revolution of the 1950s to 1980s, based on high-yielding cereals and other food crops bred from germplasm made freely available to plant breeders, has kept the world free of famine since World War II. This era of plant-breeding in the service of humanity has ended. Nobody in their right minds would want to get entangled in a legal gridlock. There will not be another green revolution!

I was carrying with me a scientific presentation to deliver in conjunction with the Award. In that presentation, I had to cite from the work many other scientists—very few scientific papers can be written without reference to previous works. If it had been obligatory to obtain permission from each of the scientists I had to cite, I would never have written my paper. But science is based on the principle that knowledge is the universal property of all humankind as soon as it is published. Those who do not share, do not publish, do not get cited, and do not get recognized. If all scientists withdraw from sharing of knowledge, it would be goodbye to science!

But universities and research institutions have been diverting money from research into patent application, counting their patents as a measure of research productivity. Patent offices, swamped by patent applications, are approving patents with lower and lower standards of examination. They have decided leave it to the patent holders to sort themselves out in court. Eventually, nobody will be able to afford the legal costs, not even the commercial organizations that lobbied for patent protection in the first place.

Florida Everglades and Tropical Blackwater systems

2009-02-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

I finally got to see the famous Everglades of Florida, in the company of two botanists, Jack Fisher of the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden and David Lee of Florida International University.

It was a warm Sunday and the Everglades National Park had plenty of visitors. The most amazing sight was the large number of alligators sunning themselves on the side of the road. The Park Rangers warn visitors not to get closer than 10 feet of the alligators. It is a very serious offence to feed the animals.

I recognized a number of plants that are grown in Malaysia as ornamentals but which are native to the Everglades. These include the pond weed Pontederia cordata, the creeping palm Serenoa repens and the white-flowered sedge Dichromena sp.

I was intrigued that the water is black (actually tea-coloured)and the bed rock is limestone. In Malaysia blackwater is associated with sand, on the sandy plateaus of Gunong Tahan and the Maliau Basin and in the Kerangas forests of Borneo. Blackwater systems are reputed everywhere to be poor in nutrients. The colour is due to tannin leached out from decaying leaves. The question arises as to why ALL forested rivers systems are not blackwater systems. In Kuala Tahan in Malaysia's Taman Negara National Park, two great rivers meet. One is a blackwater river, the Sg Tahan, arising on a sandstone mountain and flowing over sand; the other is normal water from a granite mountain flowing over clay (derived from weathering of granite). This suggests that the reason for blackwater is the absence of clay to absorb tannins. Clay is also known to absorb and hold nutrients. In its absence, nutrients would flow out of the system. In Borneo 'kerangas' means 'land on which rice cannot be grown'. So the Everglades may be an American version of Kerangas.

David Fairchild Medal

2009-02-01T04:06:00.000-08:00

On 4 February I will be flying to Miami to receive the David Fairchild Medal. The medal is for plant exploration. It will be a long flight, 24 hours in the air with a short break in Paris. Coming back via Paris will take 21 hours.

David Fairchild was a plant explorer responsible for many plant introductions into the US from overseas before WWII. He bought a large property in Miami to house his collections. This property was named the Kampong. It now operates as part of the not-for-profit National Tropical Botanical Garden of the USA, dedicated to conservation, research and education relating to the world's rare and endangered tropical plants.

This is my first trip to Florida and I am looking forward to seeing the famous garden of David Fairchild.

Growing curcumas in the humid tropics

2008-12-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

There are many species, and in Thailand, many beautiful hybrids have been developed. The plants will grow and flower well in Malaysia and Singapore. After that they go dormant. Perhaps new plants will emerge and flower one more time but that will be the last of it. I have tried various ways of storing the corms after flowering and found that, for the variety I have been growing, the resting period is 5 months. If If I leave them in the ground, they will rest 5 months and if I store them dry in a basket, and replant them at say 3 months, they will remain dormant for another 2 months in the ground. I have tried storing them in my refrigerator. It makes no difference. The domant period is still 5 months. Better to store in a basket away from sun and rain. If left in the ground they may simply rot away.

After planting, it will take another month before new leaves appear above ground. After that, development will be fast. The soil should be friable, well-drained, and fertile. If you do it right, each of your original corms will flower once and produce two to three side shoots but the side shoots will not flower. When the last of the flowers have faded, dig up the plant and wash away the soil. You will have two or three side corms beside the old one, each of which will give you a new flowering plant in the next round. It appears that each corm needs to be rested before it can flower.

A Borneo origin for the Chinese flowering cabbage Choi Sum (Brassica rapa var. parachinensis)

2008-11-28T06:11:00.000-08:00

The origin of the Chinese flowering cabbage ('Choi Sum' in Cantonese)has been a bit of a mystery. It was long popular in China and Japan before it became known to the western world. Most authorities think it originated in Southeast Asia. It certainly grows well in the tropics where it is widely cultivated by ethnic Chinese farmers, but I have never seen it wild in the Malay Peninsula, and the seeds are usually imported (from China or Thailand?). The plant also does not 'escape' and grow by itself without human help. These observations made me doubt the theory of its Southeast Asian origin.

However I recently noticed a small form of this vegetable in native markets in Kuching. It is less than half the size of the form grown by Chinese farmers. I made enquiries and found that it is known as 'sawi dayak'. It is grown by broadcasting the seeds on newly burnt hill slopes on which the inland communities grow hill rice. The very small seeds are sold cheaply in small packets, each containing hundreds if not thousands of seeds, so the plants must be prolific seeders and perfectly adapted to the local environment. Hence I now believe that sawi dayak is the parental wild type of Choi Sum and its origin is indeed Southeast Asia, specifically Sarawak in Borneo.

The Chinese form of this vegetable needs daily watering and tending. The sawi dayak is watered by rain only. It is just the vegetable for the 'let-it-grow-naturally' organic farmer.

Physalis alkekengi (Chinese Lantern Plant) has very sweet fruits

2008-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

I have just spent a week in Inner Mongolia province of China. As usual, I kept a lookout for interesting plants, but the plant diversity in Inner Mongolia is very low compared to Sichuan and Yunnan.

The most interesting find was the fruit of Physalis in a market stall. I think this must be Physalis alkekengi, the Chinese Lantern Plant. The fruit is an orange berry half the size of a cherry but completely covered by 5 expanded calyx lobes. There is a related weedy species in Malaysia, Physalis minima, locally known as letup-letup. Another species, Physalis peruviana, also known as the Cape Gooseberry, was introduced to Malaysia about ten years ago and is sometimes used in restaurants to decorate meat dishes. The fruits of all three species look very similar.

The fruits of P. minima and P. peruviana are both rather tasteless, but the fruits I found in China are as sweet as the sweetest grapes. It is also said to be a highly ornamental plant, with the calyces red in colour when fresh. P. alkekengi is perennial, surviving tbe cold winter by virtue of a resting underground stem. It may not thrive in the tropics. It would be interesting to hybridise it with P. minima to produce a sweet-fruited plant for the tropics.

The homing ability of a caterpillar

2008-09-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

As a gardener, I love butterflies but detest caterpillars. Whenever I see them on my plants, I flick them off and that is the last I see of them. This is an account of a caterpillar that I flicked off three times and each time, it found its way back to the host plant.

It was a large caterpillar about 7 cm long, black in colour, with a pattern of gold ringed ‘eyes’ and white transverse bands made up of small closely spaced white spots). At the tail end, sticking up, was a spur. This was identified by an entomologist as the caterpillar of a hawkmoth.

I found two of these caterpillars feeding on a plant of Impatiens walleriana (busy lizzie) growing in mixture with other flowering plants on a raised flower bed in my garden. The bed is one brick high and is demarcated by a line of bricks. I flicked the caterpillars off with a stick and they landed about 30 cm away on the lawn . On the next day, one of them was back on the plant. The other was not seen again. At first I thought this was a caterpillar that I might have overlooked. I flicked this off and made sure there were no other caterpillars on the plant. An hour later, I noticed it was back on the plant.

Intriqued, I flicked it off for the third time and this time I watched as it recovered from the shock and crawled on the grass in the direction of the host plant. When it arrived at the dividing brick wall. It tried to climb the wall but gave up. Instead it crawled on the grass alongside the brick away from the host plant until it came to a gap between two bricks that was filled with soil and small weeds. It crawled up this gap to the top of the bed and headed straight for the host plant, past a number of other plants of other species. I was surprised by its ability to make a detour and still find its target.

I was going to give the caterpillar a rest before putting it though some further tests, but when I came back a few hours later, it had disappeared.

Can anyone put me in touch with other accounts of homing ability in caterpillars?

Acacia mangium growth in relation to light and nutrients

2008-08-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

In a recent experiment, we grew Acacia mangium under five light intensities: 4, 7, 25, 50 and 100% side by side with four other rainforest species under conditions free of water stress. Acacia mangium outgrew all the other species as expected, not only under 100% light but also under 50% and 25%. It had the highest leaf turnover rate due to its short leaf life span, which is about 300 days at 4% light dropping to 100 days at 100% light. Its leaf life span drops at a rate of 40 days for each doubling of light intensity. Compared to the next fastest growing species, Shorea roxburghii, Acacia mangium grows 4 times as fast but takes up 15 times as much N, 10 times as much P and 16 times as much K.

Our paper has been published in the Journal of Tropical Forest Science 20 (3) 218-234 (2008). P.S. Tong and F.S.P. Ng: Effect of light intensity on growth, leaf production, leaf lifespan and leaf nutrient budgets of Acacia mangium, Cinnamomum iners, Dyera costulata, Eusideroxylon zwageri and Shorea roxburghii.

http://info.frim.gov.my/cfdocs/infocenter/booksonline/index.cfm?menu=jtfs

Leaf demography, phenology and light

2008-08-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

In the humid tropics there is no obvious climatic stimulus to make a tree shed its leaves, but leaf-shedding occurs nevertheless. Some trees shed old leaves and produce new ones all through the year, good examples being the papaya, the oil palm and the coconut. The majority shed leaves all at one go and replace them simultaneously with new leaves. The switchover is usually so smooth that the trees never appear to be bare, so tropical humid forests appear evergreen. In most years there is little or no synchronization between trees, but once in a long while there is a baffling mass synchronization event.

In the 1930s, R.E. Holttum, then Director of the Botanic Gardens Singapore, had the idea that leaves have an inherent life span and are shed when their time is up. He monitored the leaf change cycles in many trees for 10 years or more and found that each species follows an approximate periodicity, with a variation of up to a couple of months. He could not explain the variation.

Recent studies have shown that leaves exposed to full sun have shorter life spans than leaves in shade. A just-published paper by Ms Tong Pei Sin (my student) and myself describes an experiment comparing 5 species (Acacia mangium, Shorea roxburghii, Dyera costulata, Eusideroxylon zwageri and Cinnamomum iners) under 5 light intensities (4, 7, 25, 50 and 100%). This study shows that leaf life span is shortened by a constant amount for every doubling of light intensity. For example, Acacia mangium leaves have a life span of about 300 days at 4% dropping to about 100 days at 100% losing about 40 days per doubling of light intensity. Shorea roxburghii leaves have a life span of about 550 days at 4% dropping to about 200 days at 100%, losing about 70 days for each doubling of light intensity.

Hence leaves do have a life span, but it is a service life span, not a calendar life span. We propose photosenescence of leaves as one of the drivers of phenology in the humid tropics.

Trees in nature, being subject to varying cloud cover, would vary in periodicity of leaf fall because no two periods would ever experience exactly the same combination of cloud cover conditions. A long period of cloudy weather would prolong the leaf life span of many trees and if this is followed by clear sunny days, many trees would trip over their tresholds and shed leaves simultaneously. This would be accompanied by production of new leaves and inflorescences in mass synchrony. The full paper is availble:

http://info.frim.gov.my/cfdocs/infocentre/Korporat/2003Publications/Links/JTFS%2020(3)/CONTENTS.html

or

http://info.frim.gov.my/cfdocs/infocenter/booksonline/index.cfm?menu=jtfs

Creating cannas for the ever-flowering tropical garden

2008-07-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

The creation of new flowers is something most gardeners leave to professional plant breeders. Since there are very few professional plant breeders in the humid tropics, the rate of development of new varieties in the humid tropics is very slow. I would like to change this by getting more gardeners into plant breeding, starting with something really easy -- tropical cannas.

Cannas are good subjects because they come in many different floral colours including red, yellow, orange, pink, cream, near-white and mixed or mottled. The leaves are green, red, or striped. There are talls, mediums and dwarfs. Each flower lasts usually two days but a head of flowers may carry up to 20 flowers. An inflorescence usually bears 2-3 heads of flowers in succession and some bear up to 15heads. For every shoot in flower, another should be half-way and a third pushing up from the rhizome underground. Flowering can be prolonged for years.

Here are some other statistics.
Time from pollination to seed-ripening: about 20 days
Time for treated seeds to germinate: about 7 days
Time from germination to flowering: about 3 months
Time for doubling of plants by division of rhizomes: any time after 4th month

There are few plants that one can hybridize and evaluate within 6 months. This is a phenomenally rapid rate compared to tulips, curcumas and orchids.

As far as I know, all cannas, if fertile, will hybridize with each other. However, many garden forms are sterile. The fertile ones advertise themselves by producing fruits spontaneously and spradically. To start your breeding programme, make a collection of fertile varieties first.

To produce new hybrids, apply pollen from a fertile plant to the stigma of another fertile plant. This is best done in the afternoon, using freshly shed pollen.

Open a fully developed bud (tomorrow's flower). Strip off the sepals and petals until you are left with the two innermost members. One will be a stamen, somewhat like a small petal in appearance, which bears an anther on one side. The other will be a flattened pistil, at the tip of which is the stigma. The anther will already have split and deposited its pollen on to the side of the pistil. The pistil, with the pollen on its side, can then be used to dab the freshly shed pollen on to the stigmas of already opened flowers.

After about 20 days the seed will ripen. The seeds harden on drying and will keep for a year or more. To germinate, make a small cut in the hard seed coat with a wire cutter and plant about 1 cm deep in soil.

Springtime all the time--the ever-flowering garden

2008-07-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

I gave a talk on this topic in Kuching a couple of days ago, and this is a brief summary.

The everflowering garden can only be created where it is warm and moist all the time, as in the humid tropics. The British had a go at it when they ruled what is now Malaysia and Singapore, but most of the flowering plants they used were annuals imported as seeds from Britain. In front of their bungalows, the British created lawns fringed by borders of flowering plants. The lawn tradition survives but the flowering border could not be sustained. By default, gardens in the humid tropics are evergreen--monotonously so! However, in the past 50 years, more and more tropical perennial ever-flowering plants have come into existence. I counted over 100species in my book Tropical Horticulture and Gardening. The ever-flowering garden is now well within reach and should be one of the aims of tropical gardening.

50 years ago, it was a problem to keep bougainvilleas in flower. Now there are ever-flowering bougainvilleas in a wide range of colours, thanks of plant breeding and selection. Other plants that have become ever-flowering are the drunken sailor Quisqualis indica and Kock's bauhinia Bauhinia kockiana. New forms of Hibiscus, all ever-flowering, have been bred in Hawaii and Australia. Ever-flowering heliconias have become common. Ever-flowering Canna were bred by the late Professor Holttum in Singapore but most of these have been lost; we have to start all over again.

I am particularly keen on cannas because they are easy to breed and select. I distributed hybrid seeds in Kuching and encouraged my audience to form an informal club for future breeding and dissemination of seeds. The breeding and selection of cannas will be my next blog.

A Natural History Museum in Malaysia

2008-05-06T05:50:00.000-07:00

Natural history museums are organizations set up for research on animals, plants, and often of minerals, for the preservation of scientific reference specimens, and for public education through authoritative science-based exhibitions. Malaysia, though one of the top countries in biological diversity, does not yet have a natural history museum. Today a further step was taken to establish one, to be called the Natural History Museum Malaysia (NHM Malaysia).

Nine months ago, the Ministry for Natural Resources and Environment, with financial support from UNDP, appointed a team of consultants to prepare a framework proposal for such a museum. As leader of the team, I presented our report to the Steering Committee for the Museum today. Our report has been accepted, and a small project management team has been set up. The team will be based at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and will be headed by Dr L.G. Saw.

This will be good news for the scientific community in Malaysia which has been lobbying for a natural history museum for over 20 years.

Bumper durian crop expected July 2008

2008-04-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

There are usually two durian crops a year in Peninsular Malayia, in about December and about July. However, last December the crop was very poor. Last night I came across a few durians for sale. I stopped to talk to the stall keeper. He told me his fruits are the last of a miserable crop that he had obtained from Johore. However, he said there will be a bumper harvest in July, because durians all over Peninsular Malaysia are now heavy with little fruits.

Durians take 3-4 months from flowering to fruiting, so the flowering must have occured in end March to early April 2008. A big flowering event in durians usually coincides with a 'gregarious flowering' event in the forests affecting all kinds of trees. Hence I expect a bumper crop of all kinds of forest fruits, and a feast for the animals of the forest in July to August. It has been many years since the last such event.

A bumper crop is not good news for durian farmers, because it means the price will be too low for them to make a profit, or even to pay for the fertilizers and for the labour to pick up the fruits.

Cooked cabbage as snail bait in a water lily pond

2008-04-27T03:34:00.000-07:00

The water lily pond in which I grow Victoria lilies (Victoria amazonica)was suddenly invaded by water snails two weeks ago. Although the undersides of the lily leaves are thorny, the thorns give no protection against snails. A friend who was with me recommended using boiled cabbage leaves to trap the snails. We did this, placing lightly cooked leaves on the water every evening. It works. Every morning, there are dozens of snails on each leaf, which our workers remove and destroy. I do not know if we can completely eliminate the snails by repeated trapping, but the Victoria lilies have recovered.

The golden chain, Lophanthera lactescens

2008-04-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

One of the most attractive trees introduced to Malaysia in recent years is the golden chain tree, Lophanthera lactescens. This caught the attention of Dr Mahathir, then Prime Minister of Malaysia, during his official visit to Brazil. Shortly after Dr Mahathir's return, I was asked to identify a sample of the plant at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia in Kepong. Within a couple of years, the first plants were being offered for sale, but they were few and expensive and apparently propagated by cuttings or marcots. The trees were able to flower prolifically, but the fruits were all devoid of seeds.

Last month I was greatly surprised to find trees producing apparently viable seeds. I collected and planted the seeds and after one month, they began to germinate.

Plants raised from seeds are genetically variable, while plants propagated by cuttings are genetically uniform. Genetic variation allows for selection of plants best suited for particular needs, in this case, horticultural needs under Malaysian conditions. The original plants would have been adapted to Brazilian conditions and may be suboptimal for Malaysia. We do not know what could be better because we have no basis for comparison and selection. The successful production of seeds opens up the horticultural possibilities.

I can provide seeds to those in Malaysia or Singapore who would like to try them out.

Alternanthera sessilis to treat high blood pressure

2008-04-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

On Aug 1, 2007, I posted a blog on Alternanthera sessilis as a treatment for high blood pressure. A few weeks ago a friend asked me for it and I went to the wet market in Kepong to see if it was available. Not only was it available, but several vegetable stalls were selling it, and very cheaply too, at M$ 1.50 per bundle. Each bundle is enough to make three cups of herbal tea. It is quite pleasant to drink. I have tested it on myself, but as I do not have high blood pressure, I cannot vouch personally for its efficacy. However, I hear that this plant (a weed in wet places, easily propagated by cuttings)is now being sold in wet markets all over the country.

GM food and NGO pressure groups

2008-04-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since the last famine in Asia. Now food prices are rising and people are wondering whether there will be a shortage. Where will the next technological advance in crop productivity come from? Has the time come for GM (genetically modified) food?

If there is a choice between hunger and GM, there is no doubt GM will win the popular vote.

The anti-GM lobbies, which have run a successful campaign for two decades will soon be facing a crisis. As a scientist, I think the anti GM lobbies have been running an unreasonable campaign based on fear. A reasonable approach would have been to insist on strict regulation, safety tests and compulsory labelling.

When I was working in the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) and CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research) I was dismayed at how NGO pressure groups in Europe had hijacked the agendas of the development agencies in their countries and had indirectly taken control of the FAO, CIFOR, and other international agencies that depend on funding from those countries. Asians like myself in these organizations had very little influence on the direction of programmes, because our own countries were not footing the bills.

I had been an NGO leader myself in the Malaysian Nature Society in the 1970s and 1980s, but we were a home-grown NGO that did not receive any funding from overseas. The language of European-funded NGOs baffled us. They were, from the start, against big business, against the companies that were producing and marketing improved agricultural seeds, against GM crops, against oil palm, against logging. They were for the right of the poor to remain poor. They preached that shifting cultivation was good and sustainable. Subsistence agriculture was, to them, the way of the future (of course not for themselves, but for Asians and Africans). Developmental aid should only be only for the benefit of the 'poorest of the poor', not to help strengthen weak countries. As an Asian I felt insulted, so I quit my well-paid positions.

The NGOs are not entirely wrong, but they are irresponsible in forcing their social theories on societies to which they do not belong. Instead of promoting good governance, consultation, proper enquiry and research, they indulge in publicity-generating pressure tactics and short-cut dead end solutions. They have had relatively little influence in Malaysia and China and none at all in Singapore, but they are everywhere in Nepal, Philippines, Indonesia, and Africa. When I was in FAO, one consultant back from Ruanda was lyrical about how happy and sustainable Ruanda was, with every family cultivating its own plot of land and making do without cash--the root of all evil. This was Ruanda just before it erupted in ethnic strife and blood-letting. Are there more Ruandas on the way?

Post election euphoria

2008-03-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

I cannot resist saying a few things about the elections in Malaysia in which the ruling coalition BARISAN won the right to form the federal government again but lost a large number of seats. It also lost control of 5 of the state governments. Right up to the eve of the elections, I was getting email and sms messages from people to vote for the opposition. I only got one message to vote for the BARISAN. There were legions of passionate supporters of the opposition, only a few lukewarm supporters of BARISAN. The BARISAN could not inspire volunteers to its cause. All its supporters expected to be paid, either up front or later in the form of rewards. On TV and in the streets, those who spoke for the opposition were more coherent, more intelligent and more convincing than those who spoke for the government. BARISAN lost the young, the intelligent and the passionate.

Ramin surprises

2008-02-18T06:09:00.000-08:00

Ramin (Gonystylus bancanus), a timber exported by Indonesia and Malaysia, is at the centre of a controversy over whether the species should be banned from the timber trade. Ramin grows in peat swamp forests and such forests are disappearing because after extracting the timber, the swamp is often drained, and the land converted to agriculture. There is no incentive to save the forest because the ramin fails to regenerate. After 50 years of research, foresters have not figured out why ramin does not regenerate in nature.

Curious to find out more, I purchased 8 saplings (4 ft tall and rooted in polybags of clayey soil) from the FRIM nursery and took them home for observation. I placed them under a small tree in a row, watered them well, and went away on holiday for two days. It did not rain during those two days. When I came back, I found to my great surprise that the tough leathery leaves of the plants, especially of the four plants closest to the edge of the shade, had begun to dry and curl up. Six leaves had already been shed on the ground. I watered the plants liberally, but next day, another 60 leaves were shed, including leaves that had re-absorbed water and looked healthy. Next day, three more leaves were shed and the day after, another three were shed. The shedding stopped after that. By then two saplings had shed most of their leaves, one sapling was totally bare, and one had a few dry and dead leaves hanging on it.

Before interpreting these observations, let me digress a little. When a tree is stressed from shortage of water, it has three levels of reaction. If the stress is not severe, the tree recovers when watered and does not show any damage. If the water shortage is more acute, the tree forms an 'abscission layer' at the base of each leaf stalk, which has the effect of cutting off the leaf. By cutting off its leaves, the tree saves itself from drying out. If the drying is sudden and drastic, there is no time for abscission layers to form, and the leaves dry up and die on the tree.

Incidentally we can tell a lightning-struck tree from a tree dead from disease, because in the former the leaves are not shed whereas in the latter, they are.

In the case of my ramin plants, the four better-shaded plants recovered on watering. Of the four more-exposed plants, the one with dead leaves hanging on it is probably dead. The other three, having shed all or most of their leaves, are now stable and should recover.

It has certainly been a surprise to me that ramin is so sensitive to water stress. This is has not been reported before, but then, not many foresters take their experiments home and watch them closely.

Digging tools for the garden: fork versus changkul

2008-01-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

Farmers and gardeners in Asia use one general purpose tool for digging, lifting soils, leveling the ground, and slicing off weeds at ground level. This is called the CHANGKUL in Malaysia. In the hands of an expert, the changkul is a very versatile, precise and cheap tool. For the the amateur, the European garden fork is a much better tool for digging. You place the fork exactly where you want dig, before pushing it into the ground. For lifting rhizomes and tubers, nothing can beat a fork.

The European garden fork has never caught on in Asia. Because a fork works like a lever in turning over heavy soils, the steel teeth and wooden handle must be able to absorb strong lateral force without breaking. Good forks are made of high quality steel and special timber. It is a curious fact that despite the abundance of timber species in Malaysia, only one Malaysian timber has ever made the grade as a resilient tool handle. This is 'tempinis', Streblus elongatus, formerly used for shoulder poles ('kandar' sticks)used in carrying heavy loads on the shoulders. The loads were balanced one at each end of the pole. This timber is no longer in the market, for lack of demand.

We won't moan the passing of the kandar stick, but it is a pity nobody is interested in improving the quality of locally-made hand tools, and bringing tempinis back into production.

Managing a grapevine in the humid tropics

2008-01-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

In a mediterranean climate, grape vines are pruned back drastically after the grapes are harvested. The vines live through the winter in a leafless condition. Then in the spring, they produce new growth, in the process bearing leaves and flowers.

In the humid tropics, vines can grow throughout the year, but produce only leaves. I have found that when the vines are pruned back drastically and deleafed by hand, new buds will sprout after two or three weeks. If flowers are produced, they will be produced on inflorescences located in a very specific place: adjacent to the third leaf at the time of new growth. Nowhere else and at no other time! If the opportunity is missed, there is nothing to do except to give the plant a few months to grow and then repeat the process. Flowering is not guaranteed but you get another chance with each flush of new growth.

Unfortunately, my grapes are small and sour.

Solitary passionfruit bears fruit

2008-01-03T06:06:00.000-08:00

According to the textbooks, solitary passionfruit plants will not bear fruits, because they require cross-pollination. A solitary plant that I am growing on a rooftop garden in Kuala Lumpur, seven storeys above ground, and far from any other passionfruit bears abundant fruits. The species is Passiflora edulis. I expect the seeds will produce self-fertile plants. I would be happy to send seeds to anybody who would like to try.

Greetings for 2008

2007-12-31T06:55:00.000-08:00

To the five known readers of my blog, I wish a happy new year 2008.

I have been unusually busy during the past couple of months on a consultancy project with a tight schedule of deliverables. The Christmas and New Year break has been a real relief. Before Christmas I was travelling through Chicago, Washington, London and Leiden. It was cold! I am glad that my home is in the tropics and my garden is always green.

Sichuan cuisine, pandas and pickpockets

2007-10-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from a week's holiday in Sichuan Province in China. The autumn colours at Jiuzhaigou were glorious. The food was something else. We did not mind the hot chillies but there was something else in the food that caused our lips and tongues to go numb, like a shot of anaesthetic at a dentist's. It was an alarming sensation for our party of 30 Malaysians. The ingredient turned out to be the fruit capsules of Zanthoxylum piperitum, also known as Sichuan pepper. It is neither pepper nor chilli, but a relative of citrus (family Rutaceae). This is the defining ingredient of Sichuan cuisine. The Sichuan people fry this in oil together with chillies to bring out an aroma reminiscent of lemon and anise. Added to meat, vegetables etc, it provides a distinctive fragrance combined with fiery hotness and a numbing sensation.

We visited the Panda Breeding Centre at Chengdu and discovered why Pandas are so popular. They are slow, clumsy, good-natured and people-oriented. They wrestle with each other in full view of the public and feed on bamboo shoots while sitting in an upright position facing the public. There were many little ones in the nursery. I was busy snapping photos when a pickpocket took my wallet from my back pocket!

China is being rebuilt on a grand scale. The main roads in the cities are the widest I have ever seen anywhere, with 6 lanes for cars, one lane on each side for bicycles and another lane for pedestrians, buffered from each other by trees and shrubs. The public toilets have improved everywhere. There seems to be a great deal of optimism, wealth and youth in the cities.

Sunflowers

2007-09-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

I know very little about sunflowers but because it is an oil-producing plant with pretty flowers, I think it is worth some attention. My first few packets of imported seeds performed terribly. The plants were spindly and the flowers did not contain any viable seeds. Then I bought a robust plant already in flower in a local nursery. This produced some seeds and I raised several dozen plants successfully. However the percentage of seed set ranges between zero and 80%. I have not seen any pollinators. According to the textbooks, most cultivars are self-incompatible. I expect, by selection, to produce plants that are self-compatible, which should then have a high percentage seed set. Simultaneously I will eliminate all weak plants. We will see how many generations are needed to produce strong high-yielding plants for humid tropical conditions. A sunflower generation is about 5 months. An oil palm breeding cycle is about 5 years, so I will have done 10 generations of selection for sunflower in the time it takes to do one generation of oil palm. Sunflowers are way behind oil palm in oil yield per ha, which is why only a maverick like me will work on it. It's the challenge, you see; the horticultural equivalent of computer geeks starting up from a garage.

Review of Tropical Horticulture and Gardening

2007-09-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

My book, Tropical Horticulture and Gardening, has been reviewed in Chronica Horticulturae, publi shed by the International Society of Horticultural Science. The review may be of interest to readers of this blog, now suspected to exceed five in number.

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening.
Francis S.P. Ng 2006. Clearwater Publications, Kuala Lumpur.

Review by Prof. Jules Janick in Chronica Horticulture Vol. 47 No 3 September 2007

This is a stunningly beautiful book. Its 361 pages are crammed full of over 1000 colored photographs taken by the author, a Malaysian botanist and former employee of FAO in Rome. The book contains 9 chapters: 1. Plant Domestication, 2. The Knowledge System for Plants, 3. Plant Form and Habit, 4. Ferns and Fern Allies, 5. Gymnosperms, 6. Flowering Plants: Monocots, 7. Flowering Plants: Dicots, 8. Garden Design, and Plants, and 9. Tropical Environment. The bulk of the book are excursions; chapters 4 to 7 are arranged by species within families, all arranged alphabetically, with rather minimal but incisive descriptions that include the origins. The prose is well written and the love of plants as well as botanical and horticultural expertise of the author shines through. The chapter on Garden Design contains images of famous gardens thoughout the world visited by the author. There are over 50 information boxes. This is a coffee table book on tropical plants and gardening that will appeal to temperate horticulturists who wish to get aquainted with the diverse garden flora of the tropics.

The jatropha bandwagon

2007-08-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

In the past few months there has been a surge of interest in the growing of the physic nut Jatropha curcas for the oil content of its seeds. The plant grows in the tropics on soils too poor for most other crops and the oil can be used as diesal for car engines. This is going to meet rural energy needs in poor countries, help prevent soil erosion, create income for women, etc.

All this sounds familiar. In the 1980s somebody calculated that Africa and other tropical regions were going to suffer a fuelwood crisis. Women were having to walk longer and longer distances to gather fuelwood for cooking meals. Eventually, people would have to spend more time gathering wood than cooking food. Forests would disappear, soil would be eroded, etc. Huge amounts of international development aid money were spent on fuelwood research.

Earlier, in the 1960s, another person had calculated that there was going to be an acute world paper shortage by 2000, putting a brake on the growth of literacy, so large amounts of international development aid money went into the establishment of pine forests all over the tropics.

The pinewood and fuelwood bandwagons each ground to a halt after 10 years and the predicted crises never developed. What makes Jatropha different is that it is not international aid agencies this time, but business corporations that are investing in a crop. The research will presumably be more genuine, but I am sceptical. Too many people doing the same things under top-down direction and repeating the same mantras!

I am all for research on biofuels, but the research should be more diversified, not concentrated on Jatropha curcas alone. This species is only one of many possibilities.

Herbal remedies and standards of proof

2007-08-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy scout, one of our favourite campfire skits involved a Chinese medicine man and a patient. The patient has an ailment for which the medicine man has a cure, which is a bundle of leaves and twigs. "Boil this in a big pot of water for hours until one cup of liquid remains; drink it and your troubles will be over". This was traditional medicine in our grandparents' time and we thought it was funny.

Last week, I met my old scout troop leader and, at one point, our conversation turned on cholesterol. He had been taking pills for a long time to keep his high cholesterol level down. Then a friend recommended a herbal cure: a bundle of leaves and twigs, to be boiled in a big pot of water for 2 hours, together with dried figs (optional) for flavour. He drank this for two weeks and his cholesterol came down to 4 and has remained so for months without any further treatment. So utterly impressed is he that he has been talking to doctors to conduct medical research on this plant, and cannot understand their total lack of interest.

I explained to my friend that scientific research is very complicated. One is supposed to assemble a large sample of people, divide them into two evenly matched groups, give the treatment to one group, and a bogus treatment to the other. The people in the experiment are not to know which group they have been placed into. The people administering the test should not know either. The volunteers get treatment A or B and only the designer of the experiment know what is in A and B. Then there are tough rules governing the use of humans as test subjects. If you use animals, the rules are almost as tough.

If these conditions had prevailed in the past, Louis Pasteur would not have been able to develop a cure for rabies. Having successfully developed vaccines against various fatal diseases of animals, Pasteur developed what he believed would work against rabies. No one had yet been known to survive rabies. But there was no way Pasteur could have assembled a test group of infected people, some of whom would be given the treatment and some not. So he waited until one victim was brought to him. He administered treatment. The victim survived and Pasteur became a hero. The next victim also recovered. And the next. After that, Pasteur's treatment became the standard treatment for rabies, to the regret of statisticians who feel this is a rotten example of experimental procedure.

I asked my friend to show me the plant. It turned out to be a dark-coloured form of Alternanthera sessilis, a weed of ditches and wet places in many parts of the world. The amount of stems and leaves he gave me was enough to fill a pot 25 cm diameter, to a depth of 7 cm. I added water and boiled it for two hours, topping up with water as necessary. After one hour, I added 200 gm of dried figs (labelled 'dried dates' on the packet, sold in Chinese herbal shops). I ended up with 3 cups of dark-coloured liquid. I drank one cup last night and put the rest in the fridge. I found the drink pleasant but too sweet. 100 gm of dried figs would have been enough.

I have no cholesterol problem so this test was merely to satisfy myself that the concoction is pleasant to drink and harmless (I think I still make sense as I type this). So now I am ready to test this on volunteers with high cholesterol.

How to create a tropical rain forest

2007-07-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

This is my response to a recent email: "We intend to create a multi-tier tropical rainforest along the riverbank of our (residential and commercial) scheme. We would like to know what trees and palms you would suggest for the first (uppermost) tier. If possible the tree specifications (diameter, overall height etc,) and the planting pattern and distances. What shrubs and plants would be suitable for the lower tiers including ground covers."

The property is located in Malaysia, where the climate supports tropical rain forest. To recreate such forest would be easy given time, say 20 years. But of course in a commercial property they would want it done within 20 weeks.

At the 'One Utama' shopping mall in Kuala Lumper, we were promised 18 months to create an indoor rain forest, but in the end we were able to plant our first trees only after the builders had finished and moved out. Nevertheless, our rainforest was presentable within 3 months. We had an advantage that the big trees we needed were growing close by on the same property and could be transported on a private road, and with their spreading crowns sticking out of the back of the transporter. We did not lop off any of the branches. On public roads this would not be possible.

So the size and shape of the largest trees will depend on what can be transported and the crowns may have to be trimmed. The species that can be transplanted as big trees are not many, and most are species of seasonally dry tropical forests, not of true rainforests. They include Tabebuia rosea, Pachira aquatica, Hura crepitans, Khaya senegalensis, Pterocarpus indicus and Shorea roxburghii.

Before moving big trees, I would advise removing the leaves by hand, leaving only the growing tips and youngest leaves intact. This will slow down water loss while the roots are recovering from transplanting. Wrapping the trunks in plastic sheets may also help keep the trees from drying out. The presence of growing tips will speed up recovery. Tree with big leaves are easier to deleaf than trees with lots of small leaves.

Trees should be spaced with 1m gaps between crowns. It will take a couple of years for the crowns to close up. Under the gaps, put in the smaller trees and shrubs. Fill up the gaps and plant close to get faster effect. Ground covers are sensitive to shade and moisture and each species has its own requirements. Try out different species and replace those that fade out. Palms have difficulty recovering from leaf loss, so keep as many leaves as possible while transplanting.

Getting rid of garden refuse

2007-07-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

All gardens generate refuse in the form of grass clippings, old leaves, pruned branches, and the trunks and limbs of felled trees. A keen gardener is supposed to enjoy turning all this into compost. Not me!

After spending much money and time on rotating compost bins, electric-powered wood chippers, temperature probes and other equipment, I have decided that composting is not how I want to spend time in the garden. Open burning is not an option. Open burning is illegal and it would irritate the neighbours. So I piled up my refuse in a secluded part of my garden and every few months I would pay for it to be carted away.

In the beginning, my pile got bigger by the week. Then after many months, an equilibrium was established. The new stuff I added to the top of the pile was balanced by the stuff disappearing at the bottom of the pile. Then after some years, a change took place and the piles began to shrink faster than I could add material to them. I think what has happened is that the population of organizms in my pile of garden refuse became more and more efficient in breaking down plant matter. Even tree trunks got broken down in a few months to the extent that they could be easily smashed into little chips with a hammer.

What is doing the work? I see mushrooms of many kinds popping up from time to time. There are lots of fat earthworms. Also insects of many kinds. There are centipedes, presumably living on the insects. There must be zillions of microbes. All they need is a diligent gardener to keep feeding them with new refuse . I no longer need to have my garden refuse carted away.

Lately, a friend working for a big property developer told me he had run out of hollows in the property to dump the tree trunks that he had been clearing. He has been clearing the property for years, phase by phase. Now getting rid of tree trunks was becoming a bigger and bigger problem. I advised him to go back to the old filled areas, excavate all the tree trunks with a backhoe machine, and smash them into chips. Then the holes would be available for refilling with new tree trunks. The rotted chips can be spread onto the lawns and gardens they are making.

In the humid tropics, the turnaround time for decay of tree trunks is less than one year; faster if one learns to feed the ecosystem that does the work. All those manuals on composting are impractical in the humid tropics, where it is moist and warm all the time and where the diversity of breakdown organisms is at the maximum.

Avocados

2007-05-27T03:55:00.000-07:00

Avocado fruits are among the more expensive fruits in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The fruits are imported from Australia and sold in supermarkets to expatriates and to the few locals who have acquired a taste for them. The majority of Malaysians and Singaporeans think avocadoes are awfully bland, or just plain awful.

However, in the Malaysian state of Sabah, close to the Philippines, where there is a large population of immigrants from the Philippines, avocadoes are cheap, locally grown, and sold by roadside hawkers. The quality, size and shape of the locally-grown fruits is very variable.

The avocado is native to tropical America, and was introduced to the Philippines by the Spanish in the 1600s. The Philippinos have had 400 years to learn to love the fruit, but according to Burkill's Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula, it was not love at first sight.

The Indonesians got their first taste in the 1700s. They have learnt to love the fruits, and blend it with palm sugar to make a rich nutritious drink.

Avocados were introduced to Malaysia and Singapore by the British in the late 1800s. British rubber planters often had an avocado or two growing in their bungalow gardens.

In all the books on growing avocados, we are told that single trees will not fruit because they need cross-pollination by another tree. The trees in Malaysia ignore this rule. Single trees often produce good crops of fruits. However, after having experimented with avocados for over 30 years, I can say they are extremely variable in behaviour. I have seen trees begin to fruit at 5 years, trees that did not fruit until after 10 years, trees that never fruited at all in 20 years. Fruits vary in size, shape, colour, smoothness / roughness of the skin, thickness of the flesh, quality of the flesh (creamy, lumpy, etc). A lot of work will have to be done in testing and selection before we can have a good reliable clone for our particular climatic and soil conditions.

To grow an avocado it is best to use a seed from a tree that is proven locally (e.g. known to produce abundant fruit of good quality at an early age). Seeds from another country may produce healthy trees but such trees are likely to be unfruitful.

A Malaysian Horticulturist in Florida

2007-05-15T04:18:00.000-07:00

Last night, I hosted a visitor from Florida, Charles Teh, who had emigrated to USA twenty years ago. He was practicing as a horticulturist in Singapore and Malaysia before he decided to emigrate. It was interesting to get his impressions of Kuala Lumpur now compared to when he left.

I took him to Desa Park City, a new residential area in Kuala Lumpur, and he thought the standard of landscaping and tree planting was comparable with residential areas in Florida. But he was horrified to see Bucida buceras (native of Florida) as a roadside tree here. He says this is a weedy tree in Forida. In Malaysia, I assured him, Bucida behaves itself and does not multiply on its own.

I was surprised to hear that so many of the plants we grow here are also grown in Florida, albeit with some difficulty in the winter. In turn, he was surprised to see snapdragons, pelargoniums, rosemary and pansies flowering on my balcony. I later took him to a rooftop garden where I have magnolias, persimmons, plums, peaches, apples, planes and camelias growing. We are pushing the limits. While gardeners in temperate and subtropical regions are exploring ways to grow tropical plants, some of us in the tropics are exploring ways to grow temperate plants.

A temperate garden in the lowland tropics

2007-05-08T06:06:00.000-07:00

Many temperate plants will grow and flower in the highland tropics at 1000m elevation and above. In the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia for example, fuchsias, daylilies, apples, roses, pelargoniums and snapdragons grow and flower throughout the year. In the lowlands e.g. in Kuala Lumpur, at 100m, they survive for only a few weaks or may grow but not flower.

I have been trying to grow temperate plants by arranging for them to get a cold water shower for 15 minutes a night at midnight. The water is chilled to about 18 degrees Celcius. However the effect has not been significant.

My next option was to get engineers to design a flat bed cooler on which I can place containers of plants for their roots to be cooled at night. I have opted for cooling at night so as not to have to fight against the daytime high temperature of 30 degrees. At night there is a natural drop to 24 degrees, which is a help. However the engineers have not been able to design a flatbed cooler for me. I thought this would be somewhat like a mini ice-skating rink, but exposed to sun and rain and only switched on at night. Does anyone out there know whether this can be done?

Where are the plant breeders?

2007-04-20T08:11:00.000-07:00

Horticulture thrives on novelty, and plant breeders are the people who create novelties, but breeders barely exist in Malaysia. I am a plant breeder; I breed cannas. I choose to breed cannas because cannas flower all year round and come in many colours and forms. Well-grown beds of cannas are like well-grown beds of tulips, but unlike tulips, they bloom all year round. My friend Gregori Hambali, breeds calatheas in Bogor. Gregori sends his plants to the US to be patented and marketed there by a big horticultural enterprise. None of his plants have ever been released in Indonesia. Having no US backer, I keep my new varieties of cannas to myself. Anybody who buys one canna (or calathea) can multiply it and soon it will be everywhere. I have no wish to spend money taking out patents and then spend more to enforce my patents. Our society is a long way from accepting the concept of plant varieties as intellectual property. I do not believe the newly enacted plant patent laws will encourage plant breeding in Malaysia.

I am trying to get funding by selling varieties for MR 2000 (USD 570) each. Ideally, the buyer should be a local government agency, which has a horticultural use for the plants and would not mind if the plants leak out to the public, as they eventually will. The money they spend is public money after all. I think cannas in Malaysia could be as popular as tulips in the Netherlands and become the flower of the people. New varieties should be bred and distributed freely but the breeder deserves to be compensated, like any public servant except that he is compensated not by salary in advance but by results upon delivery. If only the whole of the public service could be run that way . . .

New ethnobotanic garden in Kuching, Sarawak

2007-04-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

I have just been in Kuching to oversee the expansion of the ethnobotanic garden at the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre (SBC). The garden was designed according to my specifications and after one year, the results are terrific!

The garden was designed to display the plants used by the many different native communities of Sarawak. To obtain the plants, expeditions were made to the interior of Sarawak over the past three years. In one particularly tough expedition, I trekked 5 hours in wet weather and fading light to a village called Pa Lungan near the Indonesian border in the Bario Highlands to document and bring out a new species of banana, which we named Musa lokok. Musa lokok is now flowering and multiplying in the ethnobotanic garden, together with some tw0 hundred species of other plants, many of which will be new to science, including begonias, hoyas, orchids, aroids and ferns. Having the plants close at hand and concentrated in one location will allow comparative studies on the biology (growth and reproduction) of Bornean plants on an unprecedented scale. Eventually I expect to have over 500 species within a half-hectare area.

Already, conducted tours have been arranged for schoolchildren. Eventually tourists will be able to visit. The garden is close to the Orang Utan Centre at Semengok.

1st Review of Tropical Horticulture and Gardening

2007-03-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

Three months after publication, the first review of Tropical Horticulture and Gardening has been published. It is by JF Veldkamp and MMJ van Balgooy of the University of Leiden, in the Flora Malesiana Bulletin Vol 14 of March 1007, pages 60-62. Unusually for a joint review, the two authors wrote separate opinions. They pointed out several errors and took issue with the author over several points. But their verdict was favourable. Veldkamp thought my history of plant domestication was 'brief but informative', my introduction to nomenclature 'clear and helpful' and my chapter on morphology 'lucid'. Nomenclature and morphology are what students in botany sleep through in botany class. Of course, Veldkamp and Balgooy are professors, not students, but it is good to know that the professors approve of what I wrote. Balgooy says "In my opinion this is the best and most complete treatment on tropical gardening in SE Asia ever written."

Thank you, thank you.

Gardening for Beginners

2007-03-11T01:09:00.000-08:00

My son John has moved into a new house in Kuala Lumpur. He used to live in a condominium. Now he has land for gardening: a strip in the front and a rectangle in the back. John's neighbours are doing their gardens, and it is interesting to see all the different kinds of ideas being implemented by proud houseowners who are probably gardening for the first time.

John complains that my book Tropical Horticulture and Gardening is of little use to him and other absolute beginners. I have to confess I did not write the book for absolute beginners. I also found that house builders do not provide for gardeners. I had to have a water tap installed at the back, drainage holes drilled through the back wall, and a proper soil mixture spread over the ground, not to mention the stones we had to dig out. We bought stone slabs for a garden path and John laid a path with the slabs arranged left and right in two parallel lines. I told him normal people walk by putting one foot in front of the other, and rearranged the slabs in a single line. For an instant garden, we bought flowering plants at their peak. Among them were the daisy-like Melampodiun paludosum, which, I warned, would only last one or two months, but would produce seeds and seedlings. A month later as the plants started to fade, John complained about the weeds he was having to pull out from the flower bed. The 'weeds' turned out to be seedlings of Melampodium paludosum.

OK, so a book for beginners has to be very different from the one I wrote. Also, Melampodium paludosum is too much of a mouthful, and needs a suitable nickname. Maybe in a year's time we will have something ready for testing on beginners. By that time, John will have graduated to the next level.

Seedless fruits

2007-02-20T07:38:00.000-08:00

During the past few days we have been celebrating what is called 'Chinese New Year' in Malaysia and Singapore, 'Spring Festival' in China and 'Tet' in Vietnam. In Malaysia and Singapore, lots of mandarin oranges are consumed during this festival. This year I have been struck by the fact that most of the mandarin oranges are seedless. If mandarin oranges can be made seedless, we may expect other citrus fruits to follow.

Of other tropical fruits, we can expect mangosteens to become seedless. Already we have come across the odd seedless mangosteen fruit. Somebody should find a way to convert this rare possibility to certainty. With durians, nangkas, chempedaks and chikus there are trees that produce fewer seeds per fruit as well as fruits with reduced seed size, but we do not know if complete seedlessness is possible. Does anybody know?

Websites for Tropical Horticulture and Gardening

2007-02-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening is now listed in the following websites:
www.akademisains.gov.my
www.naturesniche.com

Here are comments from some readers
... magnificent... (Susyn Andrews -- horticultural botanist, Kew, England).
... a real treasure of information and eminently readable... (Tan Sri Chong Hon Nyan -- Patron of the Selangor Gardening Society, Malaysia).
... a monumental book... (Prof. Abdul Latif Mohamad, UKM--National University of Malaysia)
... I like it very much. (J.F. Veldkamp, Editor of the Flora Malesiana Bulletin, Leiden, Netherlands)
... a wonderfully useful book, much needed and a complete source of information re tropical horticulture and botany. (F. M. Schlegel, Forestry Consultant, Hochrhein, Germany)

Correction on burnt soil

2007-01-22T04:24:00.000-08:00

The bags of burnt soil sold in KL for RM 1.20 per bag actually contain about 5.3 kg of burnt soil, not 3 kg as earlier reported.

Because of the wood-ash mixed into it, burnt soil contains a useful level of potassium, one of the essential elements for plant growth. The word potassium itself is derived from 'pot ash'.

Gardening on tropical clay soil

2007-01-19T16:07:00.000-08:00

Clay soils in the tropics are not the ideal medium for plant growth, because clay particles stick together to impede penetration of water and air. On lawns, clay soils get compacted with time, starving the grass roots of oxygen.

Where plants have been growing naturally for a long time, leaves, bark, roots and other plant parts decompose and make the top layer of soil porous. Such top soil is the most fertile of natural soils, but it takes a very long time for new topsoil to form.

Chinese gardeners discovered long ago that the underlying clay soil, if burnt over a wood fire, becomes porous, friable and non-sticky, allowing for excellent water and air penetration. We do not know who discovered the process. For a description, we have R.E. Holttum's account in his book, Gardening in the Lowlands of Malaya, first published in 1953. Holttum was Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens and Professor of Botany at the University of Malaya.

"The earth is broken up into fairly large pieces, and piled up on top of some old wood and other refuse, into a heap some four feet deep and six feet or more across. A cover to keep off rain is necessary. The stacking of the pile is of course a matter requiring skill. It must allow just enough circulation of air to keep a slow fire burning. The fire is allowed to burn for two days or sometimes more. When the operation is finished, the earth is changed from its original condition of clay to a porous granular state. It will consist of a fair propertion of large pieces, which should not be broken up too small, grading down to dust. The dust is not good for plants that require a particularly well aerated soil, and can be removed if necessary by the use of a fine sieve. The essential properties of the burnt earth are that it will absorb water without becoming sticky, that the lumps do not readily break down when the soil is watered; and that it is sterilized, all pests and diseases and harmful micro-organisms being destroyed. "

Yesterday, I visited a place in Sungei Buloh, just outside Kuala Lumpur, which produces burnt soil. There were about 10 kilns on the site, on leveled ground cut out from a hill side. Each kiln is a square enclosure with sides about 6 ft long. A post is erected at each corner, to support a roof of galvanized iron sheets ('zinc sheets') 6 ft or 7 ft above the ground. Planks are nailed to form walls on three sides. The fourth side is left open for stacking the wood and soil. First, wooden billets are closely stacked on the floor, to form a layer one foot thick, with some gaps for ventilation. Then lumps of clay soil, cut out from the exposed hillside, are laid on top of the wood to form a 2 ft layer. Then another layer of wood is laid on top, followed by another layer of clay. Then the roof is fixed, and the fire is lit. The fire burns for one week, and the pile takes another four days to cool down. The burnt soil, mixed with wood ash, is then passed through a sieve, the purpose of which is to hold back the larger lumps that need breaking down. There is no attempt to remove fine dust.

Burnt soil is used extensive in and around Kuala Lumpur and retails at $1.20 per bag of about 3 kg. At the kilns, it is sold for 80 cents a bag. In Ipoh, 3 hours drive away, it is sold for $2.00. Burnt soil is also produced locally in Ipoh but is said to be of lower quality. The difference, apparently, is that the clay soil in Sungei Buloh contains a good proportion of sand, which makes the particles more friable.

Identity of Bauhinia kockiana in doubt

2007-01-18T01:34:00.000-08:00

Two experienced gardeners, one in Kuching and the other in Singapore, have told me that the name Bauhinia kockiana seems to have been applied to two different species. If there has been a mixup of identities, the only way to sort them out would be to compare the two plants against scientifically authenticated specimens in a herbarium.

The plant illustrated and described in Tropical Horticulture and Gardening is the one that is commonly grown in Malaysia and Singapore, but it only came into the market in the 1990s. It has become very popular because it flowers practically throughout the year.

The other plant is rare but seems to have come into cultivation much earlier. In Singapore, it flowers profusely once a year.

Citrus microcarpa on sale early

2007-01-17T17:27:00.000-08:00

The first Citrus microcarpa plants are now on sale in Kuala Lumpur at MR 38 - MR 48 for plants about 1 m tall, heavily laden with fruits. Whatever technique they use to stimulate heavy fruit production, it certainly works, for this species as well as for the kumquat, Citrus japonica. The latter has oblong fruits while the former has round fruits. Unfortunately, the fruits are already yellowing and softening, and Chinese New Year is one month away. The timing is off, at least for this batch of plants.

Chinese New Year and Citrus fruits

2007-01-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

The mandarin orange, Citrus reticulata, is in greatest demand during the Chinese New Year when they are served to guests and given away as presents. This custom is particularly strong among ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore. Mandarin oranges are imported from China. They grow in Malaysia but fruit irregularly and local fruits are considered inferior. In China, they fruit at the right time. Since the date for the Chinese New Year follows the lunar calendar and is out of synch with the solar calendar, and since plant behaviour is believed to follow the solar calendar, I have never understood how mandarin oranges in China 'know' when it is time to ripen.

Another Citrus associated with Chinese New Year in Malaysia and Singapore is the locally grown Citrus microcarpa (known as limau kasturi in Malay and calamondin in the Philippines). The plants flower and fruits irregularly throughout the year, but nurserymen have learnt to manage them so that they flower before the festival and fruits ripen just at the right time. The plants, heavily laden with fruits, are used to as decorations. Most years, the growers get the timing right, but this year is disastrous. I hear that the price for plants has doubled compared to last year because of very poor fruiting. This is blamed on the exceptionally wet weather. It has been raining every day for over a month and there has been serious flooding in many parts of the region.

I have a plant that is growing vigorously in my garden, flowering and fruiting profusely and totally unaffected by the wet weather. It grows in a pot of horticultural carbon. All the excess water simply drains off. Improved drainage may be what the plants need most in wet weather.

Introduction to horticultural carbon

2006-12-19T06:28:00.000-08:00

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening carries a description of the use of horticultural carbon.

Horticultural carbon is a great new product for gardeners in the tropics. It can be mixed with clay soils to improve soil porosity. It is sterile and only half the weight of soil. Unlike sand, it is able to hold water and nutrients. It is made from sawdust, compressed into briquettes and carbonized in a kiln. The briquettes are the main product. Horticultural carbon is a byproduct made by breaking up the brickets into particles of less than 1.5 cm diam. The fine dust or soot (1 mm or less diam) is sieved away and the rest are graded by size.

I use carbon mixed with burnt clay in various proportions: one part carbon to one part clay, two carbon to one clay, or pure carbon. The mixtures work well in flower beds and big pots. In small pots, they tend to dry too fast. The best mixture is probable two carbon to one soil (by volume)

I developed this material as a substitute for soil, for growing a tropical rain forest within a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur. The forest contains over 100 species of timber trees and palms and it is thriving on this medium.

I next used this material to grow the herbal garden of the Sarawak Biodiversity Centre in Kuching. The plants in this medium are bigger and healthier than those on normal soils.

Another project is a cactus garden on a rooftop, exposed to full tropical sun and rain. Many desert plants were able to live on this medium, showing that they do not mind the tropical rain, so long as the water drains away quickly. However, daily rain during the past couple of months have prevented them flowering.

Published, at last

2006-12-16T22:20:00.000-08:00

Today, I received a bound copy of Tropical Horticulture and Gardening. My copy was from the Clearwater Publications (International) Edition that will be available at the Singapore Floral Expo. After the Expo it will be available at Nature's Niche at the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

The Academy of Science's (Malaysian) Edition was delivered to the Academy the day before yesterday. The retail price mentioned in our discussions was RM (Ringgit Malaysia) 260 but we have no control over how the Academy will finally market it and at what price. From past experience with the Academy, the book will probably be sold direct by the Academy rather than through retail booksellers, but I will try to get the Forest Research Institute Malaysia a share of the action.

Friends who saw early drafts of the book were put off by its apparent lack of focus and advised me not to proceed. The first publisher I offered it to, turned it down. I gritted my teeth, provided the start-up finance and went ahead. To make a real impact, this book had to be radically different from everything else in the market. I wanted it to be a thinking person's book: informative, scientific, humanistic and universal, yet firmly based on first-hand and truly tropical experience. Also individualistic and provocative. Otherwise why bother to write a book? The cost of marketing takes up 50% of the retail price of a book, leaving barely enough to finance the design and printing. The effort is worthwhile only if the author has something to say and wants to say it in a personal way.

Members of the Selangor Gardening Society who saw a set of the final printed pages a week ago were greatly enthusiastic, so perhaps I have managed to pull it off.

Yes, we are almost there

2006-12-12T15:07:00.000-08:00

The printing has been done and the books should be available before Christmas. The retail price has been fixed at Malaysian Ringgit 260, but do not expect to find this book in the bookshops. The Academy of Sciences Malaysia, publisher of the Malaysian editon, has not appointed any distributor, so books will have to be obtained directly from the Academy, at 902-4 Jalan Tun Ismail, 50480 Kuala Lumpur. I will try to arrange for it to be sold at the bookshop of the Forest Research Institute Malaysia at Kepong. Members of the Selangor Gardening Society had a preview of the book and were enthusiastic about it.

The International Edition will be available in Singapore and Australia. I will post the details when I have them.

Yes, it is being printed

2006-12-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

Today, I got to examine some of the printed sheets as they came off the machine. The colour of the pictures was a little too yellow, but this was easily adjusted by the machine operator. The machine is fast and I expect the entire print job (1500 copies) will be done in one week. Not bad for a 350 page full-colour book. We plan to rush some books to Singapore for the Singapore Garden Festival on 16 - 25 December, before the official launch in Kuala Lumpur.

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening being printed

2006-12-03T01:19:00.001-08:00

Finally it looks as if the book is being printed, after weeks of excuses. I think the Printer was under pressure to rush other books and I got pushed out of the queue.

The latest printing technology is a lot better than the old technology using metal type (I am refering to the 1960s when I edited a forestry journal) but there are some new dangers in the system. In the days of metal type, each time we corrected a proof, the obsolete version would be destroyed. Now the obsolete versions hang around in the digital realm somewhere in the computer memory and come back inexplicably to haunt us. Last week, we decided to look at the latest printout and found wrong pictures on some pages, unauthorized font changes, a missing line and a repeated line. I also found an embarrassing typo that was missed in proof-reading, but I decided to live with it, so as not to cause any further delay.

Chiangmai Royal Flora Expo

2006-11-28T04:53:00.000-08:00

I visited the Royal Flora Expo in Chiangmai a few days after it opened and was greatly impressed by the effort put into the show by the organisers. Foreign visitors were greatly outnumbered by Thais, who came by the busload from all over Thailand. The huge showground is about half and hour's drive from the city and one can only approach it by public transportation. It was a good idea to keep private cars away. The parking area was big enough for hundreds of buses and taxis but it would have been impossible to accommodate private cars. The grounds had been carefully landscaped, with lakes, hills and manicured lawns. Many of the displays were put up by corporations, countries and individual exhibitors.

Malaysia make a good effort with a traditional Malay house within a lush tropical garden. The crowd appreciated this and queued up to enter. The Netherlands put up a brave show with beds of tulips that faded rather quickly in the dry weather and had to be replaced overnight. India put up a minimalist walled garden with a single Bodh (Ficus religiosa) sapling in the centre, accompanied by a prominent signboard explaining at great length the philosophical significance of the bodh tree. Spain also made a minimalist garden, but with columnar evergreen conifers making a backdrop for a small stage on which a flamenco dancer was scheduled to perform. We did not wait for the show but I was pretty sure Spain's flamenco garden would win the popularity prize. Among the indoor displays, Japan and Taiwan were impressive, the former with a Japanese landscaped garden and the latter with waves of Phalaenopsis orchids against rolling hills. Japanese gardens always look good, but for attractive innovation, my vote goes to Taiwan.

While in Chiangmai, do not forget to visit the huge flower market in town. The market houses hundreds of plant retail outlets and looks like a permanent floral expo.

The show will last three months and exhibits and themes will change from week to week. I flew from KL to Chiangmai direct, to avoid a time-wasting stopover in Bangkok Airport.

Book update

2006-10-22T02:11:00.000-07:00

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening, supposed to be printed last week has been delayed to next week. The Printer had too many deadlines to meet and I was bumped off my place in the queue.

Singapore Garden Festival

2006-10-06T06:26:00.000-07:00

Singapore, which has been the pace-setter for gardening in tropical Asia since the 1970s, will host an international garden festival on 16 - 25 December 2006. This will be Singapore's first international garden festival and it is expected to attract 200,000 visitors. The Singapore festival, with the Royal Flora Horticultural Show in Thailand in November 2006 - January 2007, will dramatically signal the rise of Singapore and Thailand in the world of horticulture, long dominated by shows in England and the Netherlands. For tropical Asian gardeners, two international class events within one year at nearby locations is a really unexpected treat. Let us all support these events. The Singapore website is www.singaporegardenfestival.com/

Biggest tropical flower show ever

2006-09-28T04:38:00.000-07:00

Thailand is planning to host the biggest show in tropical horticulture and gardening ever. This event, held in honour of His Majesty the King of Thailand, will be held in Chiang Mai from November 1, 2006 to January 31 2007. The showground will cover 80 ha and is expected to feature over 2000 types of tropical ornamental plants. This is too good to miss. Details are available at www.royalfloraexpo.com

The organizers have announced that the show will go on notwithstanding the recent change in government. I plan to be there in the first week of the show.

Update on progress of publication

2006-09-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

The publisher of the book will be the Academy of Sciences Malaysia for the Malaysian edition. There will be a concurrent international edition by Clearwater Publications (Kuala Lumpur). The final details are being put into place and the printing should commence in October 2006.

2006-09-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

Tropical Horticulture and Gardening, to be published soon, is a 360-page book covering over 1000 kinds of ornamental plants grown in tropical Asia, including ferns and fern-allies, gymnosperms, monocots and dicots, arranged by botanical families. It contains over 1300 colour photos and chapters on the history of plant domestication, garden design and plant growth under tropical conditions. This blog site has been established to promote discussion and identification of tropical plants.

First Post

2006-09-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

This is the blog for my new book, "Tropical Horticulture & Gardening".