Solanaceae - Browallia?

 
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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.