What monocot is this? Agavaceae

 
 
 

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?

 
 
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?

 
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.