Monday Morning Therapy

Home Garden

Left: Shaggy is easily the most adorable plant of the lot. He was adopted from an abandoned green-wall mock up at Orchard Road.  It is an easygoing fern that likes looking at the sun from the shady balcony. 

Far Left: Mr. Anderson is a maroon-stemmed Philodendron, the latest addition to our family. In the local landscaping industry call this type of philodendron 'Anderson's Red', hence his name.

Corner Top Left: Green Rabbit is a new addition to the family, and she came from the same shop as Mr. Anderson.

Top: Blue Butterfly Seedling is grown from a double-petaled Clitoria ternatea seed that I picked up from a cooking course in Chiang Mai back in August 2013. Because of the house renovation, it took me a while to get it sown, and out of 20 or so seeds, only this one germinated

Centre ‘Baby’ is the star of this small garden. Baby was sown on this balcony pot from a seed collected from one of my work site. We had to cut down its mum because she has basal root rot. Age: 4 months. It is a seedling of a fast-growing tree species that has the  potential to grow into a large (10-15 meter) tree in about 10 years or so.

Top Right Corner: Grey Vanda is an orchid that I picked up from the Singapore Garden Festival. It has a plain-looking but sweet-smelling grey-yellow-purplish flower.

Right: Diehard is a Ficus twig that I picked up from the garden downstairs. I had it put on a vase of water for a few months in the kitchen where it grow lots of roots. It probably does not like it, but since it is a strong plant, it did not die, and as reward for its perseverance, I recently got a pot to put it in.

Far Right: White Spider is a gift from my friend Sadaf!

Bottom Right: Mini Shaggy is a pot of newly split Nephrolepis fern.

Morning Cat

This is the resident restaurant cat at the Siglap canal.  I saw it on my way to work this morning and just can't help but feel jealous. I wish I can do that too! It slept so well that I can take the photo of its happy face close up. 

... and yeah, I missed the bus to work and was late because of this.

Hospital in a Garden, Garden in a Hospital

It has been a long time since I saw anything that trully impresses me. I guess that's just a natural part of getting old and being jaded... but, I sure was floored by what I saw this weekend at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital!

Surgery Room in the Garden?

Community-maintained urban farming garden at the rooftop of the KTP Hospital

Rooftop-grown Watermelon

Compost bins next to the Syzygium aqueum "Jambu Air" Tree

What makes Singapore livable...

East Coast Park + Bicycle!

As if your life is that hard, fat cat.

Ann Siang Hill 安详山

This is the view from the window of my office at Ann Siang Hill as the morning sun warms up the yellow walls of the French wine bar across the street. I have been pretty lucky to get a spot near the window on the ground floor. I have enjoyed seeing the occasional sliver of blue sky and the seasonal pouring rains from this spot. There would be passerby, tourists and flocks of touring schoolchildren staring curiously inside (and at my neighbor's collection of vintage batman-superman-ironman toys). There used to be a lot of the pre-wed photo crowd when the road bears the sign of "ONE WAY." Then it disappeared. I don't know why they removed it, because the road is still a one way street. But since then, we haven't seen the sexy bared-back brides and their army of photographers and lighting assistants back.

This charming historical neighborhood has seen significant changes from a few years back when it looked like a street of crumbling old buildings. My colleague who has been working here for the past eighteen years tells a story of how the shops used to be home to lion dance troupes and artists who would hang their laundry of colorful costumes from the shophouse windows. He tells of an old man who used to sit at the rounded corner junction, making lion dance masks out of papier mâché. He hated having his pictures taken by tourists. The old man would angrily chase them off any who did... which of course, upsets some people and led him to be removed from the spot.

After they went, the shophouse was dilapidated for some time until this wine bar moved in. The bar was, and still is very successful with Singapore's expat community. Many similar venues have sprung up around the area, and today, Ann Siang Hill has become a hip, happening, and expensive place to be. In a classic gentrification story - nothing else but high-end boutique shops and drinking clubs is surviving in the area. Recently, an english literature bookshop folded their place there and moved elsewhere due to the high rent. I hope the children's bookshop around the corner stayed... although I'm doubtful. In the mean time, our office has survived there because our boss has a long-standing tenant relationship with the land owner and enjoyed a discounted rent. But after 20 years of renting... isn't it time to buy the place? (well, ok, not now, since the Singapore property prices are booming hot)

Hortpark

A scientific research on vertical greenery by Singapore's NParks. A number of papers and two books have been published about this research, but I'm not going to go into details because you can find out the same thing just by googling "Hortpark" and "Vertical Green.

Compared to me... it's tall! 6 meters, to be precise.

The gruffiest wall. I like how they used the Rusellia plants here.

It's a live fuzzy soft thing.
Reminds me of the thing that that was growing HILC refrigerator at the end of the year... except that it was blue.
-.- Ewk. I had to take it out.
What was it anyway?

Twigs stuck on brownies.

Good thing that they experimented on the different systems because at least three of the 7 living walls have died or been entirely replaced. There's a picture on here and here of how it looked like originally.

Changi T3

The one green wall that is impossible to miss when visiting Singapore... The Changi Airport Terminal 3's 300-meter long green oasis/green tapestry/vertical garden/indoor landscaping (not sure what they officially call it). This system is a custom design-built system (as opposed to a pre-fab modular product) conceived by Tierra Design of Singapore, and last year it was honored with an award from ASLA.


When the wall was newly built and hasn't grown yet, you can see the service area behind it. But using a double plant support system, the wall quickly achieves a full-lush cover within two years. As you can see in the photo below, there is one climber at the front and one at the back. the plants in the front receives natural light and additional metal halide (?) lighting. While the plants at the back are shaded by the one at the front, so they are almost fully artificially lit.


When I first saw this back in 2008, I thought it's quite barren...
but over the years, it has definitely grown lush and gruffy --gruffy being my new favorite word to describe robust kind of leafy lushness. I definitely had enjoyed spending hours hanging out at the café nearby (for the free internet, really... but the airy greeny space sure puts me in just the right job-application mood. I wrote for and applied for some 10 jobs whilst being there!).

Hotel Naumi, Singapore

Back to blog again!
I just came back from a three week visit to Singapore to look at their vertical greening projects and look for my next job. I didn't have direct internet access when I was there and went for internet cafe instead. As a result of that (and forgetting my camera charger), I didn't upload my photos until I'm back home again.


Hotel Naumi is a luxury eco-chic luxury hotel designed by the Singapore-Thailand based Eco.Id Architects. It was finished in 2007, and has won a number of awards for its innovative use of skyrise greenery.


Wait. Did somebody say... green?
Looks like more steel than leafs to me!


Sure, that this green facade system is not lush green in the same way Patric Blanc's green walls are, but if you look at the system closely, they're much more sustainable than the water guzzling green wall system. In green walls, the entire substrate-surface of the wall is exposed to water loss through evaporation by heat and wind. On the other hand, green facades like this one minimize water loss because the substrate is protected in a pot, and water evaporation only occurs from soil surfaces.


The one problem with this system is that in summer/tropical heat, the sun heats up the steel so much that it could burn the plants foliage or discourage it from growing. Hence achieving plant cover on the facade is rather slow, as you can see from the skinny plant silhouette above.

Well! Let's hope that with enough water, fertilizer and love...
it'll grow and be a gruffy, green MFOpark-ish building.

Day 0 - No Studying at Singapore?!

Apparently studying is so popular in Singapore that they had to ask people to refrain from sporting their favorite hobby at the airport cafés.

Then again, Singapore sends hundreds of scholars abroad annually that, it should come to no surprise to find the cafés at the airport infested with bookworms. Ah, why fret? :-)