The Occasional Gardener

Indigo Imposters

2012-01-08T01:16:00.001-05:00

I posted back in May 2009 about how the False Indigo had captured my imagination and gone on to garner the attention of others, the image from my first post about it in 2007 even ending up on a shampoo bottle. Incidentally that first post remains the second most popular post on this site, ever.

In April 2010, Charleston Mag contacted me for permission to use that very popular image to illustrate their article Meet the Imposter and with perfect internet manners credited me as the author of that image and added a link to my site. I say 'that very popular image' because I've discovered, since google now allows you to search for an image by it's url (or by dragging the image into the searchbox), that image has been used by quite a lot of people without the exquisite manners of Charleston Mag.

I don't have a *huge* problem with this as I subscribe to the notion of Dandelion Thinking ie if you are going to put 'work' on the wild web then you should allow the winds of the Internet to toss your works to every corner of the globe. It actually makes me happy to see 'my' images illustrating discussions on forums, or being posted as a source of inspiration. In these cases, proper credit is nice but, I get it- maybe you dragged it into a folder and forgot its original source. No big deal. Neither is it necessary to reach out to me to seek permission or even add a link, I'm perfectly fine with just a text credit simply because a random search sometimes digs those up too.

However, when I google 'False Indigo' and see 'my' image in the first page of results but it links to a commercial garden center it gets to be a little peeve worthy. If you are going to profit from it's use, I think a proper credit is called for. Or even better, an offer for a packet of seed would have been nice. If you are a journalist or a respected garden blogger, I think some effort should be made to either name or link back to the author especially if in the case of the former, you state at the end of each post that your own material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

I do realize, the onus is on me to protect my own work. I don't however love the idea of slapping a huge copyright or name in the middle of the photo. I used to post a bigger version of my framed post image, which is probably how that original image self seeded all over the web, but have since discontinued that practise. I also understand that where the line is drawn in these matters is also relative to your personal views. I 'curate' or 'aggregate' things by other people I like on the web myself, always with a link to the source but not necessarily by contacting the author first. I think this is ok but there may be others who don't.

It's also worth noting that it's getting easier to use someone else's image albeit with the ability to easily link or credit via inherent software of tumbling or reblogging or the latest player - Pinterest. This is, I think, a good thing as the value of images drops in relation to the vast amount that is produced and floating around on the interwebs. When someone thinks your image is good enough to pin or tumble or talk about or mash it up into a new expression or idea then I'm all for it.

Also worth noting that taking pictures and posting on the web aka 'sharing' is now a completely new experience from before. Point and shoot quality images can be taken with your phone and immediately sent to the web. With Google plus, it does it automatically and then you decide later if you want to share it. Again, I like this, as an important facet of 'gardening', the 'looking at' part, is now something you can do online. Also, researching, thank goodness for all those images and accompanying titles and posts to help discover what that plant was that you saw. On that note I'll end positively to say I am thrilled to see that 'my' image of Baptisia Australis has played a noteworthy role in helping people identify and enjoy this lovely plant - perhaps you even bought one because of it.

Jungle Noir

2011-12-10T21:36:00.001-05:00

At the recent orchid show in Singapore, I have to admit the couple of things that I was drawn to most was not the orchids themselves. One was a dazzling display of Nepenthes, the other a diorama of a lowland jungle scene replete with a little stream and a variety of animals.

The Nepenthes display showcased a huge variety of shapes, colors and markings that I didn't even know existed. The taste level was also superb, making great use of driftwood and moss and other botanic materials that complemented the markings and colorations of these strange carnivorous flora. I also didn't know there was such a variety of sizes and habits- from hanging to small clusters.

The diorama made clever use of stuffed animals that brought points of focus into the scene. Their extraordinary markings echoed their environment, a reminder of how fauna is an integral part of any garden environment. The planting was gorgeous and instructional in the type of flora to be found in such places mixing moss, terrestial orchids, begonias and ferns.

Of note, the spotted begonias (top left corner of the rhs pic) and Anoectochilus harmonized with the markings on the critters. The orchids used were mainly in shades of green and brown, limes and chocolates and points in between - my favorite palette. Perhaps that's why I also loved the Nepenthes that were all in this color spectrum.

The overall effect was not what one typically thinks of 'jungle'- lush, large scale plants. This was delicate, complex and finely tuned. I was much inspired and in my mind's eye contemplated the blending of ideas from both these displays to formulate a design plan for a Jungle Noir garden.

Modern Eden

2011-11-05T23:36:00.001-04:00

In November, the first part of a substantial garden project in Singapore, Gardens by the Bay, will be completed, the Flower Dome. In the news recently, a 2.5 hectare Healing Garden laid out in the shape of a human body opened at the Botanic Garden. There's also the Park in the Sky, the green roofed Nanyang University and more. Without doubt this is a city determined to not only be true to it's moniker 'garden city' but also actively innovating in the area of public urban garden spaces.

A while ago I visited another such space, the National Singapore Library and had an insight into how the citizens of a modern Eden enjoy a well thought out green public space. It wasn't the internationally acclaimed design or the technology, like movement triggered escalators or light triggered blinds that impressed most, it was what the people were actually doing in that space.

First, it might be important to point out that six out of ten Singapore phone users have an iphone. I actually looked that up because I was surprised at how many I was seeing out and about in the city. Of course, I would see them as I would in any big city, in a very urban context particularly while waiting for a train or bus, but at the NSL, it was more about a kind of private reverie. Perched on a low wall quietly engaged in a text conversation or on benches that were cut into the planted borders with overhanging branches plugged into their ipods.

Inside, huge windows kept the plantings, including huge trees, constantly in view even when you got to the basement where the windows looked out to a bamboo grove. Between the buildings, a space not usually given any thought was where the cafe was housed - literally, a green oasis, the acoustics of the concrete space amplifying the pleasant social sounds of laughter and conversation.

All this seems the antithesis of urbanity, cramped hostile spaces jammed with anxious urban dwellers. It also wasn't a public 'garden' as such, where people tend to have a different set of behaviors like jogging or taking photographs or having a picnic. This was a 'city' space that did what a garden should do, encourage you to slow down, sit for a while, gather your thoughts, engage in a quiet activity or chat with a friend.

Hibiscus Sabdariffa

2011-09-30T00:51:00.001-04:00

Remember my Roselle drink? Well we dried some of the pods for use later and also tried planting some of the seeds - with great success. Now I have half a dozen Hibiscus Sabdariffa plants that are yielding enough fruit to make the occasional jug of that delicious tropical cranberry like juice.

The plants are tall now about six feet and continue to send out buds which begs the question, for how much longer? It's a different world here without a cold season and quite frankly gets me a little confused. Will plants like this roselle and fruiting vegetables like beans and eggplants just keep producing ad infinitum?

Well I got the answer about the Roselle last week when I visited an organic farm about a half hour outside the city. It's a no. The plants will slow down and eventually need to be recropped. I did learn however how the farm maximimizes the yield from these plants and that is to prune them at around two feet tall. This triggers the plant to send out four or five branches. So at the farm, each plant was the same height but with five stems and five times the yield.

The plants are relatively trouble free, good looking with their pink hibiscus like blossoms and dark burgundy stems and fruit pods, pretty enough to be in a flower border. Right now the sweet potato vine nestles at its feet but, next go around I might try something taller. A little research shows that the leaves are also edible but I've yet to try this out. What I have tried is finely slicing the pods to add to a salad and that works well as a tangy accent.

To my great surprise, I discovered that the farm I visited, sells its produce at the night market that I regularly go to, in fact, serendipitously, the seeds planted came from fruit purchased from them.

Garden of Content

2011-09-17T04:11:00.000-04:00

Managing this blog is much like gardening, you move things around, you plant some new things, some things you cut back or they die of their own accord, some things flourish unexpectedly and you, the gardener, gets a little more skilled and experienced over time. Then there's the environment which of late in the rapid changing tech world, could be described as - intense climate change - rapidly changing technology- both hardware and software. Not to mention an evolving culture around social media of facebooking and twittering.

As befits the times I changed things up a little bit here on the blog. I was motivated in part by reading this piece about how news - or it could apply to the design of any kind of information is too cluttered. As we move more into mobile and tablet forms of content - leaner more edited pages just work better - and that includes optimization for a whichever gadget you are using to consume it.

I agree. As a content user - I use an imac an ipad and an android phone I know that the experience on all three is different. There are limitations and feature differences - some things on The OG I just can't see on an ipad (flash based video, slideshows, flipbooks) although I can on my android phone. Some things I'm less inclined to consume on my phone like long form writing but I like to read books and casually catch up with some blogs on my ipad and do serious web surfing and watch videos when I'm on my computer.

Cutting to the chase, the changes revolve mainly on a slightly leaner look with more definition between original content and aggregated or curated content ie homegrown and foraged and I think the real shift - more gallery space to images. I continue to want to solve to what I'm doing with reference to ease of publishing. I do two things- take photos with my phone -which is more impromptu as I always have it with me and the more purposeful- I'm going to the botanic garden with my 'good' camera. Incidentally, I recently upgraded to a better, good camera that quite effortlessy takes beautiful images. Does this mean less processed images? Maybe for the time being. In the meantime I will be moving over my sets on flickr to view here.

Videos, I'm still tinkering with,. After using blip and trying vimeo - I like how youtube has evolved quite rapidly with more privacy controls and ease of use- can upload a video shot on my phone straight into youtube, not to mention channel customization and the fact that it is owned by google as is blogger, which is the platform this blog is on. Connectivity between technologies is an important issue now, with google+ emerging as another possible platform to easily upload and share media - this might be the subject of the next 'content' update. Also, do I want to share regular short clips or more thoughtful edited pieces. Not sure how this will play out yet.

Flipbooks - I love the aesthetics, and was inspired to make quite a few, but they need some effort to put together and now I hate how that you can't see them on an ipad. So they have slipped a little to the back burner. Twitter on the other hand is offering direct uploads and I love the look of the new photo page - no longer a link to a photo upload service but a cool framed pic. I'm a little more motivated now to stream random pics on a more regular basis. If you visit this site now- the most likely updated content is the twitter feed on the top right hand side.

Too much information here for the casual blog reader, maybe interesting to fellow bloggers dealing with similar challenges but the point of this post is selfishly for me to keep track of the changes myself - check out previous posts about content and you'll see how this changes over time. Sorry about the confusion as I'm still tidying up around here - and enjoy the images that hopefully will be more prolific and more easily accesible.

Home Brew

2011-08-26T03:43:00.011-04:00

I used to think of my morning coffee ritual as my last remaining vice, but if you are keeping up with the times, you'll know that it's vice status has been downgraded of late. Drunk in moderation to manage it's possible health aggravating and addicting qualities- coffee is officially no longer bad for you and perhaps even good for you as studies continue to emerge about how it's good for your heart, prostate, and dementia, to name a few. Being many years part of the Starbucks era of easy procurement and enjoyment of fresh ground, freshly brewed coffee it was an easy graduation to the new appreciation for serious coffee due much to the efforts of enterprises like Portland's Stumptown. No longer a guilty pleasure, coffee is a complex ancient herbal beverage that continues to have an ever expanding modern cultural relevance.

I returned home to Malaysia harboring a fantasy of rediscovering 'local coffee'. Coffee is grown here in South east Asia, and after trying pretty much every bean out there, I seem to have a natural taste bias for the bold, earthier flavor of Sumatra, which has been by preferred choice for many years. The fantasy is fueled by a childhood memory of being in a school room that happened to be close to a coffee roasting enterprise. The smell of coffee to this day takes me right back to the the sultry heat of that classroom where the pungent smell pierced the dullness of afternoon classes. I was psyched to think I might perhaps discover a local, home grown, home roasted coffee.

Well that fantasy was smashed to smithereens. At first, I was just bewildered at the contents listed on bags of local coffee being only 60 percent coffee and the rest sugar, margarine and sometimes other ingredients like flour. Immersing myself in a little coffee 101, I discover that Malaysia largely grows Coffea Liberica, with a less than flavorful bean that the local coffee industry has learnt to enhance by roasting with butter/margarine and sugar. Coffea Arabica is what dominates global coffee production and is known for its flavor. It's a little more delicate than Coffea Canephora or Robusta which it is often blended with for both it's easier cultivation and higher caffeine content. Sumatra coffee is Arabica beans grown on Sumatra, whereas my local home kopi is adulterated Liberica beans grown here and entirely consumed by the local market.

It's particularly saddening as there is also a vibrant kopitiam (local coffee hangout ) culture here that includes the original kopitiam coffee houses that still thrive replete with old school coffee pots and the newer chains that combine well executed vintage aesthetics (see pic on right with marble topped table, chinese stools and coffee cup with botanical motif) and modern conveniences like free wifi and Starbucks ubiquity - there's at least one in every mall. They usually have a great menu with local and healthful alternatives to pastries and cakes but, the rasion d'etre is a bitter, greasy, sweet beverage whose only saving grace is it's fix of caffeine. Why not offer some better tasting alternatives, I asked the owner of a small family run chain of kopitiams with heritage roots ? His answer - the locals love the taste of the local brew, so we don't see a need to change. Sigh.

All however is not lost. If I can't connect with a local grown cup of coffee, a major consolation prize is that I can connect with the plant itself, in fact I am the proud owner of one, see pic on the left. I recently learnt that coffee flowers have a perfume that is jasmine like, so it's a nice add to my perfume plants collection and bought at the same place mentioned in my last post that doesn't label its plants so I have no idea which type it is.

Thankfully too, Singapore, just an hour away is playing ball with global coffee trends and tastes. There are a few enterprises that roast Arabica beans and is even home to a few artisanal coffee establishments that I plan to check out. Meanwhile, there is the old fall back Starbucks - there's one here in Johor Bahru and I have since found a small coffee vendor in one of the markets who sells a Bali coffee bean that is quite good. Not quite my beloved Sumatra but my new found coffee guy is quite the character with his old school giant ladled scoop, glass fronted metal display tins and vintage grinder. After much banging to ensure every last powdered grain is set free and right before he puts it into into the bag, he completes his ritual by extending the ladle, inviting me to take a whiff while simultaneosly showing me the thumbs up and there I am back there in that classroom staring at the afternoon sky through wooden shutters the aroma of coffee blurring yesterday and today.

Jessamine

2011-08-17T09:44:00.005-04:00

I'm looking for plants with a perfume I told the guy working at a little nursery discovered on a jaunt out of town. He showed me a couple of plants, unlabeled of course and not one of us was proficient enough in the other's language, we tried English, Malay and Mandarin, to figure out what the other was saying. Thankfully one of them has tiny little flower buds, which on crushing reveal a delicate scent. The other has large leaves and he gestures with his hands that the flowers are spidery - ah, perhaps one of these. Sold.

The little buds have opened and have a sweet Jasmine scent. The plant itself is woody and shrub like so I try those keywords in google 'jasmine + shrub'. Bingo. It's Murraya Paniculata a distant cousin of the Citrus family also known as Orange Jessamine. It's also native to these parts with the local name Kemuning.

We have a small Gardenia Jasminoides tree already in our yard also known as Cape Jessamine or it's local name Melur Cina which translates to Chinese Jasmine. This too has a wonderful scent, I often cut some to put in my bedroom. Where the Orange Jessamine is not familiar, this Cape Jessamine is deeply so, a familiar sight in many a backyard of my youth. It's popularity owed perhaps because of its manageable small tree status with glossy leaves and seemingly perpetual blooms.

The flowers don't seem to last long though, there is a lovely tight green bud, then it is best when just opened as pictured left, then dishevels fairly rapidly. I notice that there is also a fair amount of yellow leaves on our tree and wonder if the soil might need a little ph adjustment to its preferred acidity. The Orange Jessamine on the other hand has more stamina. I can see why its tight woody habit would make a good hedge hence it's other name Chinese Box.

The leaves of 'the other' plant do look very much like Michelia Champaca leaves, which I am psyched about and the quest continues for more additions to my collection of perfume plants.

Background Color

2011-08-12T02:36:00.009-04:00

Last weekend, in Singapore I caught sight of a bright pink banana flower, framed by a fan of lime tinted leaves set against a bright blue wall and it was stunning. Years ago, I think it was in the textile museum in New Dehli, I took away an image that has remained indelible in my mind - blue walls wrapped around a courtyard with a large tree swimming in a pool of Tradescantia Pallida Purpurea. The power of this image, the dark gnarled trunk, the shadows of its leafy branches and the vibrancy of the purple Tradescantia against the blue has since, always made me aware of how effective a strong background color is in a small garden space.

Blue walls have been a signature of some famous gardens belonging to artsy types - most famously the cobalt blue walls of Jardin Majorelle, Yves San Laurent's Moroccan getaway and there's also Frida Kahlo's Blue House, not as deep a blue but more intense than the one I have pictured above which, like the one in Dehli casts a little lavender. A blue background is a a great foil for these orange flowers in the Mission district of San Francisco and the lime tones of spring in Manhattan. The Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang shows how this color is as much at home with Marrakesh cactuses and Mexican yuccas as it is with Chinese shutters and lotus flowers.

The other wall color I keep coming across in Singapore is red. Although it has clear oriental associations with the color of red lacquer and the walls of the forbidden city, this color has for me many more global associations from the Brownstones of Manhattan and the saltbox houses of New England to many a Tuscan wall, the Dutch Buildings in Malacca and the stone walls of Agra. Here in the tropics the warm tones look great with the warm browns of wooden shutters and pink plumeria or a gnarly bougainvillea, as above. On Cape Cod a stand of hollyhocks perhaps and in Tuscany, a line of terracota pots with huge red geraniums.

I saw a few yellow walls in Malacca, pretty but somehow they weren't quite right. Yellow can be a diffcult color especially when it casts green. This image of the jade green walls of the Peranakan mansion in Penang, combined with wood shutters, gold decorative accents, on the other hand looks like the perfect starting point to embelish with potted foliage in a range of greens.

How does one choose? Well end use would probably help inform that decision. The psychology of colors tells us that low arousal colors of blue and green would be best for a spot intended for quiet reverie- a shady enclave to escape the afternoon sun or a peaceful breakfast nook. High arousal reds that stimulate the appetite would be great for an outdoor dining area particularly for use at night, the glow of lanterns and candelight making the space warm and intimate.

Doesn't all this color talk just make you want to pick up a paintbrush?

Strange Allure

2011-08-03T13:14:00.004-04:00

The Durian is indeed a strange fruit. An unfriendly spiked shell with a powerful lingering smell that is either putrid or heavenly depending on which side of the great divide you stand. It is outlawed in taxis, most hotels, hugely expensive compared to the many other fruits available and right now, the season is in full swing.

It changes the local urban landscape. Small vendors set up shop out of the back of their cars, larger trucks and stalls are strung up with lights and in the cool of the evening the hustle and haggle of durian trade ensues for the length of the season. Those unwilling or unable to take the rank fruit home are afforded aluminum tables for an immediate roadside feast.

Last year I didn't eat a single one. Many years (maybe twenty) of abstinence living abroad made up part of my reluctance - the smell requires a leap of faith to dive through to reap the rewards of the complex sensory pleasures that follow. The other part is the now somewhat complex variety of cultivars and clones on offer, many of them with both inscrutable and unattractive names like D168. Inevitably unable to decipher which to buy, I would opt for the other fruits that also coincide with durian season- more of that in another post.

This year however a phone call from one of my Dad's old students alerting us that he was bringing over some durians from another alumni who owns a fruit farm broke the spell. In minutes he was over with four durians reminding me also of how we used to get durians. Not from a bustling roadside stall but from a friend or neighbor who had been out of town and brought back a haul perhaps from family in a rural area or from a farmer on the roadside. My grandfather, a lawyer, who sometimes did pro bono work for rural folk would often be paid in kind come durian season of a bushel of fruit.

And so I came to be reaquainted with the strange allure of this native fruit, one almost impossible to describe. Custardy, creamy, sweet, rich it packs a powerful sensory punch and by day four when we got to the fourth one and it was a dud with spoilt fruit, the disappointment seemed to strike a little deeper than expected. Is it it's high tryptophan content that hooks you? Am I really thinking I might have to buy some at the market next week to score a fix. Yes, I think I might have to.

A Revolution Blooms

2011-07-20T00:34:00.010-04:00

Revolutions are literally, blooming. The Tunisian Jasmine revolution propelled this flower to the status of 'nefarious change agent', its very name perceived to have such 'destabilizing potency' in China that the NYTimes reports it is blocked from text messages and a summer festival named after it, cancelled. The flower and plant itself can no longer be sold, purchased, worn, or talked about. Something similar went on here in Malaysia a few weeks ago, dubbed the Hibiscus Revolution referring to the national flower of this country but the origins of its momentum lies similarly in the outlawing of a color that a garden would struggle to be without - yellow.

When supporters promoting the Bersih Rally for Clean and Fair Elections the week before it was planned started to get arrested for wearing its definitive yellow t shirts, an action Amnesty International quite accurately described as absurd, and the Malaysian Bar called unlawful and unconstitutional, the government's Kafkaesque and heavy handed response started to raise the concern and ire of the rational populace. Although all this aversive activity accomplished it's intent of instilling fear, it also miraculously had the opposite effect, it actually steeled the resolve of more people to attend and revolutionary talk flourished exponentially online. The internet is proving to be a fertile medium for unrestrained public conversation.

On the day itself, frightened to wear or carry any evidence of this contraband color in case of arrest, some protesters ingeniously walked into local florists and bought yellow flowers to carry. Some carried flowers to show their intent to rally peacefully only to be subjected to a brutal show of force by the police. On the day after, the government controlled media published the most shocking lies, for every one of which there was contrary evidence on twitpic or youtube to irrefutably deny. Only 6,000 attended they said, the pictures of 50,000 strong told a different story. The police, claimed, no excessive force was used but video of events showed different. The internet is also proving to be a fertile medium for truth.

As someone who has lived in functioning western democracies all my adult life, where somebody is protesting about something it seems on a weekly basis, witnessing and living this kind of overt repression is new and shocking. There's also a certain sadness to see the learned helplessness of many who have only known this kind of governance for the last fifty years remain quiet, too scared to speak or sadder still, actually believe that somehow this abusive behavior is for their own good. Then there's the admiration and gratitude for those that spoke up at great personal cost, especially in the case of Baharuddin Ahmad, who lost his life in doing so.

It wasn't the din of the protestors on that day that has resonated the most, it is their transformative stories of unity and solidarity, not only surprising the participants themselves, but inspiring those that lived vicariously through them. I was moved to tears to learn of Muslims offered and accepting refuge to pray in a Hindu temple, and of simple acts of kindess like the offer of a hand to escape the tear gas or some food or water that crossed racial and religious lines. Here is where a revolution truly bloomed as these human stories of goodwill flowered in the hearts of good people accustomed to divisive politics. In the new short prose of twitter, testimony after testimony, of shared experience began to thread together like a beautiful garland and compose a powerful message of unity and hope.

Coincidentally, well before all of this I had been planning to put more yellow into the garden. The large New Zealand Flax, with its striking yellow variegated leaves has been insisting that it needs more companions. I recently bought and planted a yellow flowered Mussaenda glabra and a variegated Ginger with striking yellow brushstrokes on its leaves. Already in the garden the yellow edged Sanseverias are harmonizing with the fruit of the fan palms that have turned a rich yellow on their way from green to orange. A Turmeric plant sends the color underground into the earth and soon I will plant the Hoya to send its yellow tinged flowers scrambling upwards. More yellow will soon follow and the garden will be rife with subversion and a daily reminder of what must happen next - that what was planted on July 9, 2011 by the bravest of us must be tended, nurtured, propagated and brought to fruition by the rest of us.

Fermented Tea

2011-06-28T23:13:00.002-04:00

It's a vastly different sensory experience to make a cup of Pu erh tea if your more typical one, like mine, is ripping open a flavor sealed tea bag. The tuocha or tea cake, a dense ball of clearly organic matter wrapped in brown paper transports you somewhere a little closer, if not quite to the Yunnan tea plantations that it hails from, then certainly somewhere more rustic.

I came across this tea in Singapore in a department store that had a huge assortment of tea including these strange paper wrapped parcels. They were the size of the one above as well as large pancakes and oblong brick shapes. I researched them initially because I loved the graphics on the wrapper but then discovered the contents to be intriguing.

This particular one is Xia Fa Crane label from 2006. The identical brick from 2004 is almost twice the price. I've no idea whether this is the ripe or raw version - I'll have to go back to the tea shop to find that out. All the text on the wrapper is in chinese and there are quite a few variables in play in terms of classification shape, processing, method, region, cultivation, grade, and season. All this of course makes for a product that generates connoisseurs and enthusiasts and a market for rare,vintage and high priced versions.

The connoisseur thing is not my cup of tea, however the prospect of a really good brew at an affordable albeit premium price is in the same do- able territory as splurging on a heirloom tomato at the farmer's market. I quizzed the guy in the tea shop about the difference between the 2004 and the 2006, was it twice as good in flavor? He wasn't convincing enough so I got the 2004 and told him I would be back to try the other if I liked it.

I learnt that you need to prise the brick apart to get a better retention of leaf shape when it hydrates and they really do which makes for almost a built in strainer. The brewing process involves a preliminary step of rinsing the tea before allowing it to steep to rinse off any extraneous stuff and to loosen and expand the leaves. It's recommended to store the tea not in an airtight container but wrapped in paper or in a non air tight ceramic jar- as it is still ageing. Before you even drink it, you have a far better sense that what you are drinking comes from a leaf and that it is somehow still alive.

So what does it taste like? It doesn't taste 'fermented' which was my big expectation. My first thought was that it tasted like a really good cup of chinese tea, maybe even something that I had tasted before at a good chinese restaurant but didn't know it. Full flavored with no bitterness and leftover tea iced the next day, although a little cloudy, was exceptional combined with honey and local grown lemons. Looks like I will be back for that brick from 2006.

The Papaya Tree

2011-06-15T06:32:00.010-04:00

I grew a tree. Now there's something I did not think I'd be saying. Trees were always something I perceived to be out of my league as an urban apartment dweller. To be honest this was a particularly easy tree, a Papaya tree, which, in the space of a year grew about nine feet tall and has been for the last few months successfully bearing fruit, smaller than the ones we get at market but sweeter and with more flavor it's flesh a more vibrant color.

This explains its ubiquitous presence in the tropical garden - or used to. Back in the day, everyone had a few Papaya trees growing in their backyard. I don't remember us ever buying this staple fruit usually served daily at breakfast. I still remember my parents, on vacation, ordering room service at the Railway Station Hotel in Kuala Lumpur (now well past it's prime), bringing the classic post colonial breakfast of eggs, kippers and a slice of Papaya served with a wedge of lime, white napkins and heavy silverware.

Perhaps of all the fruit trees, Papayas because of their quick maturation, easy care and continous fruit production are the most likely to be grown in neighborhood gardens although by and large it is a practise that has been abandoned in favor of purchasing them from the supermarkets or day or night markets as properties shrink and the little land they are on, concreted over.

When I first returned, we got our papayas from the day market following my Dad's method of fruit and vegetable shopping- immutable loyalty. He only frequented one vegetable and one fruit stall in the market - the same ones he has patronized for years. If the fruit lady did not have papayas, we went home without any despite the fact that the next stall would have a mound of them. Invariably, on the way home he would also remark how he could depend on her to select the best ones, which as I was to discover when I started buying them myself, her choices weren't that reliable. Often they might be ripe but not sweet and without much flavor.

I have since become the designated fruit and vegetable shopper, with a diametrically opposite approach- zero loyalty spreading my fickle patronage across the supermarket, various day and night markets and the occasional stall on the roadside - picking and choosing things that seem more seasonal, selecting vendors that seem more successful or more specialized, which is how I came to find the couple at the night market who only sold Papayas and always only had a few left by the time I arrived. After three purchases, it became clear that their Papayas were significantly better than any other and I searched for them everytime I went - they weren't always there probably because they had sold out and gone home.

They are a quiet pair, weighing up your selection, hardly looking up. When I asked where the fruit was from, he told me he buys them from farms close to the city but he only selects ripe fruit because he does not use chemicals to ripen them. In contrast, the other fruit vendors are laden with boxes of apples from New Zealand, pears from China, out of season mangoes from Thailand and dubiously ripened papayas, while their immigrant staff from Indonesia or Myanmar hustle and call out to the passing trade.

Therein lies the global story of produce that's happening here too with the local twist that - even though we don't have weather limits to our growing season, we are still importing fruits to enjoy them year round outside their typical annual fruiting cycle and we manipulate their ripening process to make for easier transport and storage. We also import tasteless homogenized cool temperate fruits like apples and pears because many locals think they are 'better'. It's a leftover psychology from colonial days- if it's imported it must be better. This, in a land where fruit is so plentiful, cheap, so unique, and so diverse. Thankfully our Papaya tree and the couple at the night market helps to circumvent this madnesss with the added payoff of having fruit that has significantly better color and flavor.

Rock On

2011-05-16T22:41:00.003-04:00

Love my garden! Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry said the message that had come halfway around the world from Mamaroneck with a picture (above right) of the quarter moon rock garden. It was the very last thing I had worked on in the Mamaroneck garden and and I'm pleased to see it survived the winter and is up and raring to go this season- ok maybe not the Rosemary.

Coincidentally just the other week I was in the supermarket and they had a new stash of succulents for sale and I picked up three so that I could have a pot of them here (above left). It's a reminder not just of the quarter moon but how the idea of of it took root almost four years ago. Ceramic pots are ridiculously cheap here so there is very likely more potted succulents to come.

While the succulents are something that translates well here, the woody herbs, that are the other feature of the quarter moon- not so much. I haven't eaten fresh Oregano, Thyme or Sage this year that I've spent back home. They aren't available in the plant nurseries here and to be honest there is little incentive to track them down or try to grow them from seed when the many local herb alternatives that are easy to grow are plentiful and a natural fit for the local cuisines. OK I might make one exception - sage, the occasional Carbonara would be awesome.

Epiphytic

2011-05-08T11:54:00.008-04:00

A recent outing with my brother in law the orchid geek has got me a little more interested in this species. Although I admire the exotic alien beauty of the blooms and how photogenic they are, they seem strangely awkward to me in a garden setting. A visit to the orchid garden in the Singapore Botanical garden didn't dispel this notion - except perhaps in the Cool House where they were staged more naturalistically on tree trunks.

During this visit to a couple of local orchid vendors, one a nursery and the other a private collector something else struck me about them and it wasn't the flowers. Both these vendors specialized in wilder varieties that were much smaller, had a more interesting range and variety of leaf shapes with no flowers or less conspicuous flowers which they were more likely to comment on their scent than their looks.

The first to catch my eye was a Denrobium, maybe this one with a leaf shape that did not look orchid like at all. Everything was also grown on these twigs, branches and planks of wood and hung on the fence or suspended in mid air. I couldn't help thinking they looked like those floating islands in the movie Avatar. And that's when my interest really kicked in because I started to notice that there were other things growing along with those tiny orchids - a miniature Hoya, moss, ferns. They really were like little floating islands with their own little eco systems. I bought three of the ones that had lots of other stuff growing on them.

What do they need I asked? Oh just water and maybe a little diluted foliar feed now and then. After years of digging and soil preparation and attendance to the concept of soil medium, it's a little difficult to wrap one's brain around this epiphytic thing where the plant derives its moisture and nutrients from the air and rain and sometimes from debris accumulating around it.

I hung them, on advice, in the branches of our Gardenia Jasminoides, then after a couple of weeks shifted one to a spot nearby with similar conditions, shady but not too shady, where there's a gap in the fence. At one of those orchid places, he had some growing in the chain link of his front gate. This is all adding up to some very interesting variables. No medium, vertical possibilites, interesting variety of foliage shapes and the flowers are a bonus. If I think about some more aesthetically pleasing alternatives to chain link and scraps of plank and rubber foam - there's some seriously interesting gardening possibilities and design fun to be had here.

Cool Tonics

2011-04-23T09:33:00.016-04:00

A decade ago I read Andrew Weil's book Spontaneous Healing and it resonated with me having grown up exposed to other cultural systems of wellness that aren't 'alternative' here, a better word might be - parallel. Although we went to an allopathic doctor, we also frequently took over the counter Chinese medicines, tried local folk remedies and most of all were aware of and practised what Dr Weil was championing then - food as medicine.

On a daily basis we were reminded not to eat certain combinations of food (pineapple and milk was a big no) and not to eat certain things if we were not well (no shrimp with fevers and no peanuts with coughs). Who knows how true these rules were- but it certainly cultivated a mindfulness about food that's become ingrained. There were Chinese soups and even desserts that were complex botanic brews and a part of everyday life. Indian Curries were no less a multitude of botanic ingredients rich in medicinal properties. These 'tonic' foods are as Dr Weil describes a way to strengthen or invigorate the healing system. This process orientated form of wellness management he regretted was not evident or disappearing in the west.

One particular form of tonics that we were not forced to partake in although occasionally encouraged to try was tonic drinks. They were a tough sell because they were invariably wickedly bitter. They are still very much in evidence here and in fact gaining a new popularity - its not unusual to see little refrigerators full of an assortment of these drinks, much like the smoothie section in a NYC corner deli, and the traditional herbal tea shops with their large dispensing vats still do a brisk business.

I've been trying quite a few these drinks and there's definitely an acquired taste issue. Some I marginally like, some I outright dislike - those would be bitter and there are some weird 'woody' and 'peel' type flavors that I just don't love. I recently learned that there's some nuanced vocabulary to describe these drinks - there's 'foo' which is outright bitter (no can do) and there's 'kum' which is bitter-ish, like the bitterness of a strong overbrewed tea - that, I can handle. There's one I love- Roselle and Hawthorn and another that my cousin made at home called 'Jook Jeh' with red sugar cane and Rhoeo Discolor leaves -it was a beautiful purple color with a sweet grassy taste- perhaps a little too sweet. I made it at home without the rock sugar, added a few leaves of Black face General or Strobilanthes Crispus from the garden and a little honey- good.

At the night market I've been seeing these bundles of red leaved Alternanthera Sessilis ( Hong Tian Wu ). It's to make the blood move, the stall vendor tells me. Sold. Although like most herbal tonic drinks the primary feature is usually that they are 'cooling' - hence the term 'leong char' or 'cooling tea'. So into the pot it went with some red sugar cane and some Tradescantia Zebrina from the garden for my next home experiment. It was a particularly beautiful color - much like the color of the source material as pictured above, but the taste was a little spinachy, a little sugar might have helped but I'd just read the piece in NYTimes about how posionous sugar is that I am now working on the principle of two out of three ain't bad- it was nice and cold and it was pretty to look at.

So now I have a few homemade tonic drinks that I rotate, Roselle, a ginger and mint green tea and this red sugar cane with 'herbs'. They have become cold drink alternatives that I freeze and keep the fridge well stocked with that feels like I've gained some ground in the pushback against cans and plastic bottles and sugary chemical concotions and in the increased use of local and backyard plant material. The NYTimes had a piece a while back called Making Tea From Plants Grown in the Backyard which was not entirely positive, complaining that often the flavor was just plain not good or not there. If you're thinking of not just getting food from your backyard but also the occasional drink, the herbal decoctions described here might provide some clues on a different direction - it's not just about the leaves or a 'tea'- its a liqour made from a broader assortment of leaves, flowers, stems, fruits, nuts, seeds and roots.

Tinctoria

2011-04-13T23:06:00.011-04:00

Trend guru Li Edelkoort's horticultural magazine Bloom recently looked at color from nature as a source of inspiration. Color from flowers and plants was also part of her trend presentation for Summer 2012 called Earth Matters. If you're not quite ready to fling yourself into growing a dye garden filled with woad, indigo and madder and do it yourself dyeing there's a small area of natural coloring that might be a closer reach - coloring your food with plant material.

There's the easy ones like turmeric and the not so well known ones like Perilla which the Japanese use to color vinegar and there's the blue pea flower pictured above that is used locally here to make a sweet glutinous rice cake an unusual food color - blue. There's also drinks, my recent discoveries include Roselle and another local recipe made from stewed sugar cane and the leaves of Rhoeo Discolor that turns out a pale purple. Beet juice, chive vinegar, spinach pastas, anything with berries- there's quite a few recipes to try.

Apart from turmeric and saffron which colors up strong, most natural plant dyes tend to impart a softer shade - materials are more likely to be tinged, imbued, tinted, or stained with color. See how the brilliant pea flower just lends the rice about half its vibrancy. And therein lies the rise of popularity of synthetic dyes which have the capability to create vivid, brilliant, saturated hues cheaply and with much less effort. But they aren't so cheap in the big picture when we see the toxic and carciogenic effects of these chemical processes exert their toll on the people who work in these industries.

If we are to move in the direction of non toxic natural plant color dyes then what we must begin to do is adjust our color tastes. Li Edelkoort is encouraging creatives, designers and product developers to re discover the tinctorial arts of plant coloring and use their skills to seduce consumers into more subtle vegetal shades.

Try some food coloring experiments this summer when the garden provides material and opportunity to create mindfulness of how color really works, naturally. Colors as we see them in the garden are not something we can easily re create without the use of harmful chemical agents. Capturing nature, might be harming it. Colors safe enough to eat is a related concept with the prevalence of it in everyday food and drinks - its principal target and victim being children. Can we rearrange our heads to make responsible consumption, delicious? We really should.

Occasional Gardening

2011-03-25T02:37:00.005-04:00

Finally, I can report some actual gardening. It's taken a while for me to get going. First I had to just take in what grows here - the links below will describe the source of some of my decisions. Then, I needed to figure out what I wanted to 'do' without really changing what is already here - ie enhancing the basic layout without disturbing the already established plants but with some kind of point of view. Most importantly - I had to find the plants. After a trip to a small garden center in our neighborhood and then one to a much larger one in a suburb of the city which also yielded some amazing ceramic pots at outrageously low prices, I had the material and some ideas to make that start.

We basically have a small front yard and a long side yard with a brick lined skinny border already full of some fairly large mature plants. There are however quite a few empty patches in between these larger plants and right in the middle of the side yard there is a small tiled area which is the site of the septic tank. This area is exactly outside the window where our dining table is and the window is visible the minute you turn the corner as you walk downstairs from the bedrooms. So ideas about what to 'do' crystallized around making this view more interesting - which it certainly is now, I walk downstairs in the morning and am drawn to the window to look out for a few minutes before I sit down for breakfast.

In the picture you see a couple of the new design features I've added. On the left a large saucer like water pot planted with some kind of Globba (I think- a lot of plants from the garden centers came without labels), Pennywort and Water Lettuce. There'll be more waterpots to come - I hope to cover most of that tiled area - you can see where the idea for this came from here.

In the bare patches I've added foliage that have dark or purple tones- you can see in the picture Tradescantia Zebrina, Coleus and I've also got just out of the frame some Rheio Discolor and a tall stemmed Kaempferia. I've moved a few things around and also added some new things which are all in the ginger family inspired by my trip to the Ginger Garden - there's an unnamed ginger, a Costus, a different Globba, a Galangal ( Lengkuas) a Turmeric and hopefully the Black Turmeric I brought back from Rimbun Dahan will also take root. So there's a dark and ginger thing going on in this section.

I'll describe the other ideas and plants going on in other sections in further posts but just to sum the actual physical experience of gardening here in the tropics- boy, is it hard work if you have a lot do. Moving things around and planting a few things is sweat drenching labor. I think occasional gardening is maybe the only way to go about it and I have to guiltily admit, I got a fair amount of help from the maid. I also got a lot of help at the garden centers- the local one had an older Malay lady, the larger suburban one a young man from Myammar- both were fairly knowledgeable about growing conditions and end size and genuinely enthusiastic about showing me things as we zig zagged the property looking at different things.

Golden Gardenias

2011-03-19T00:30:00.001-04:00

I was late for the garden tour at Rimbun Dahan which started at 9 am, in fact I pretty much missed all but the last 30 minutes or so. I joined it just as they were about to enter the Rumah Uda Manap which had gorgeous botanical decorative art - worthy of another post later. As I took off my shoes to enter the house I was struck by what was in the water pot at the foot of the stairs - flowers floating in the dark water, exquisite sculpted forms, in a saffron yellow color that was stunning.

To be honest, I didn't notice the garlands of the same flower strung up around the doorways until I got home and looked at the pictures later, but that's because there was so much to look at in the house and I was tuned into the narrative of our host Angela Hijjaas as she talked about the design elements and the details of its' thoughtful reconstruction. I loved that the house was also very much 'alive' being home to one of the current resident artists Jessica Watson. Kitchen towels were hung to dry and a pile of children's toys bore testimony to that as we also peered into one of the rooms which is she used as a studio. See a video poem by a previous resident artist Mike Ladd.

There is still a little more of the garden tour left as Angela announces that we are going to go see the gardenias next. Ah, it's those saffron colored flowers. We stroll under a row of trees, Gardenia Carinata, laced underfoot with flowers and take in the perfume from the flowers overhead. I pick up a bloom to sniff. Angela picks up and hands me a smaller, much paler bloom to explain that the flowers start almost white and then as they age, they darken and also lose their scent, barely having any by the time they fall to the ground. I bring both home and the younger bloom is still fragrant a day later. Almost a week later the older bloom, though dried and withered still holds on to some of that magnificent color.

The garden tour ends and we go into the gallery where there is an exhibition of the work by the resident artists created during their year at Rimbun Dahan. There's a large painting (combined with embroidery) by Jessica of the gardenias titled "Love in Bloom", a fitting bookend to my aquaintance with the Golden Gardenia. She captures that marvelous color and adds an interesting textural element with the embroidery on the leaves.

What began as a curiousity about what Angela and her architect husband Hijjas Kasturi are doing, through their their website (found incidentally on a random google search for indigenous malaysian plants) had become after this visit, a realization of the blend of philanthropy they extend to the artist community, their dedication to environmentalism and indigenous culture. Can't wait for another opportunity to see more of their commendable efforts to combine art, environment and local culture in a meaningful and contemporary context which now extends beyond Rimbun Dahan with their new venture Hotel Penanga in Penang.

Yes, We Still Have Bananas

2011-03-08T21:55:00.004-05:00

I read Dan Koeppel's article Yes we will have no Bananas when it came out back in 2008 and was struck most by this sentence - There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It explained something I sort of knew noticed grown up eating a variety of different kinds of bananas- something that I am reminded of again now that I'm back here in the tropics where there are so many different kinds of bananas available it's hard to keep track of their names.

The one pictured on the left is Pisang Mas (gold banana) and is easy to remember because of it's much smaller size- like little sausages. They also remind me of a similar banana that my grandmother liked which I vaguely remember being called Pisang Monyet (monkey) which had some discernible seeds and perhaps closer to the wild species. According to Dan Koeppel's blog the Pisang Mas is starting to become available in the US under the name Chiquita Mini.

Apart from looks, the flavors and textures are also different. I'll have to do a more thoughtful comparison of a few different ones another time but the Pisang Mas for example has a warmer, peachier color, much firmer texture and it's harder to peel. Combined with a local yogurt from Little India that is both thicker and saltier, it is altogether a delightfully more complex flavor combination than 'bananas and yogurt' might imply.

I almost always buy bananas from the night market from a certain Malay lady who has a small stall with produce from her own garden or as she replied to my question about this- 'from the village (kampung)'. The other banana pictured is also from her, one that I am not familar with Pisang Embun (dew). This is an alternate universe from that described in the article where huge economies of scale are arrived at by only supplying one type of banana efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable....all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate.

The main thrust of Koeppel's article is that this singularity of banana production is capable of wiping out the world's commercial crop because of vulnerablility to disease coming from the same gene pool, it's happened before in the 60's. The diversity found here, ensures that we might still have bananas in this part of the world when that happens. Hopefully the 'grow your own' movement might eventually catch on here as it has done in the US and we might return to what was a common practise- growing bananas in our own backyards.

Ironically, where bananas were a staple in my NYC kitchen for the very reasons that are causing it's precarious situation- it was cheap, and easily available, I don't eat bananas as often here. The reason being -there are so many other options. I eat almost 3 times the amount of fruit I did in NYC -Mangoes, Jackfruit, Papaya, Mangosteens, the list goes on but bananas only when the Malay lady has a good looking batch on her table that week.

Pepper

2011-03-05T00:04:00.009-05:00

I'm working on a couple of side design projects that are local based and have been researching the Pepper plant, Piper Nigrum. Historically pepper has been an important agricultural product in this state since the early nineteenth century, grown together with Gambier (as an under plant). Hence the recurrence of the design motif of Gambier and Pepper intertwined as a decorative element. It can be found in the borders of old lithographs, as well as ornamental ironwork on city street lamps and carved into stone and woodwork in public places and government buildings.

Coincidentally, I regularly see fresh green peppercorns sold at the market, so this week I buy a handful of the string of green beads, like little green bracelets, to get up close and personal with them. I taste a couple - they are exactly as you would imagine, with the flavor of black pepper but fresher, less harsh and vegetal as opposed to something woody. They would be great in a sauce, stir fried with something or pounded into a paste like the Thai green curry paste. I also drop some in hot water to see what happens- they crinkle and turn black resembling the form I am more familiar with, which after drying in the sun, would be how they would be processed to become black pepper. The leaves are also used in Thai cuisine in stir fries.

Both the design projects have strong local identities, a journalist who writes extensively about the region and a non profit that provides the means for local disabled citizens to make a living making handicrafts (rattan, bookbinding) operating since 1952. The local Pepper and Gambier motif are a shoo-in to include in the design work for both but as I research, I struggle with the Gambier part, its a plant that has lost its significance in the modern world. It was used for tanning and dyeing and also as an ingredient in the antiquated habit of chewing sireh - slices of Betel nuts, Gambier a dab of chalk, rolled in a Betel leaf.

Pepper on the other hand remains an important crop, even enjoying an increased popularity and record prices. I also happen to discover that there are pepper farms being added to the Bio Desaru Organic Food Valley, a government initiative to encourage more up to date agricultural (green) principles and (bio) technology. Pepper, besides it's stake in the state of Johor's history, will play a role in it's future. I abandon Gambier for my projects and focus on Pepper, it's modern day relevance adds meaning to it's historical and spicy connotations.

A few weeks ago I also happen to discover Black Pepper essential oil in Singapore made by a Thai company called Lemon Grass House and really, really liked it. Unlike the usual associations of pepper being an irritant and sneeze inducing, the oil has a stimulating, uplifting quality. They also have oils from other local plants Kaffir Lime, Nutmeg, Turmeric, Ginger that I'm eager to try out. I used to make my own ointment with Oregano, Lavender, Calendula and Plantain essential oils - now it's time to configure a more appropriate tropical version and Black Pepper oil which has some interesting properties will definitely be in the mix.

How strange, I've never really been a big fan of Black Pepper, it's always a no when the waiter hovers with the pepper grinder and I rarely use it in cooking and here I am all peppered up.

The Soul of the Begonia

2011-02-09T01:19:00.005-05:00

There's an exhibition currently at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan called Fragrance fills the Courtyard, a celebration of Chinese Flower paintings through the ages. I drooled over the preview images on the site, not just in regard to the artistry but the mediums. I'm fascinated with the variables of color, material and time, the prospect of seeing a how ink, paper, silk and water based color were utilized, how they have aged over a few centuries and focussed on the subject of floral portraiture - heaven.

The colors of Yun Shouping's paintings stood out, they seemed different, more vibrant in their choice and more unusual in their combination. His Bio reveals a reputation for using 'gaudy and offensive' colors, a rebel attitude that probably set him apart and established his status as one of the major artists of the Qing Dynasty. I looked for more of his work online and found the one pictured left, mistakenly, I'm sure titled Crab Apple from his Album of Flowers and Landscapes. Yun Shouping was from the Jiangsu province but he travelled all over China so it's not unlikely that he came across this muse further south. It's a Begonia, for sure, which may be why I was particularly drawn to it.

This last week of Chinese new year festivities has been a visual assault of lurid red and gold. Every botanic motif used has been a sledgehammer reference to 'wealth', 'prosperity' 'gold' or in plain speak - 'money'. This Begonia painting, a delicate, complex colored, soulful contemplation of nature devoid of heavy handed metaphor is the perfect antidote.

Begonias have pleasant and familiar childhood associations for me. There was always a Begonia pot or two gracing our front porch or the porches of friends and family, just as there is now at my father's house. They are blooming furiously which was noted by my visiting brother in law, who I am thrilled to discover is a plant geek with a large collection of wild and native orchids which I look forward to seeing.

I was quizzing him about his passion, Orchids, asking him about what their preferred habitat might look like and he espoused on the their epiphytic nature and how they are usually in trees etc but then added - and they share the same habitat preferences as Begonias, look up to see orchids and look down to find Begonias, often near a stream. In that moment the porch living Begonia leapt out of it's pot in my mind's eye and into a more illumined view of it's true nature. I always feel I 'know' a plant a little more when I have a better idea or have seen where they naturally thrive.

The other associated revelation is that they are native or that there are native varieties here which I must of course now investigate further . The other thing I must do is to learn a little Mandarin. Chinese paintings are full of text and colophons. Capturing the soul of a flower it seems is better achieved by adding a textual narrative to the image. It's frustrating not knowing what the painting fully 'says' or understanding the artists full intent, especially when this marriage of text and image, like an ancient albeit more artful precursor to blogging, seems hugely relevant in an era where this combination is an important component of modern culture.

Roselle

2011-02-06T05:50:00.008-05:00

What on earth are those strange alien squid like things? I thought the first time I saw them at the night market. Weeks later I see a photo of it in a cafe garnishing a drink called Roselle. It's Hibiscus Sabdariffa, the strange squid shape is the calyx of the flower. The drink which I of course had to try, was just 'ok', nothing to write home about, the garnish was perhaps a pickled calyx- weird.

The last time I was in Singapore however, I bought a bottled drink in Chinatown from a 'tonic drink' vendor - labeled Roselle and Hawthorn and it was a much different experience - a 'wow' that's thirst quenching, tasty goodness. When I saw alien squids available at the night market last week, I bought a half kilo to try. Researching this a little further, I discover that it is also known as Jamaican Sorrel so I proceed with the processing- boiling lightly but adding a little fresh ginger, per the Jamaican method. The result: 'wow'. On tasting it I thought, mint in this would be nice, which I discover, along with vanilla is how the Senegalese prepare it, called Bissap.

The homemade version without any sugar is more fruit juice like than a tea - somewhat cranberry like in flavor which jives with another of it's monikers Florida Cranberry. The color of the liquid is also gorgeous, a red somewhere between beet and blackcurrant juice. It tastes and looks like something that's awfully good for you and it apparently is, being rich in antioxidants and high in calcium, niacin, riboflavin and iron. I wonder if using the dried version is as good, it's a main component of Red Zinger tea which is not a favorite of mine.

Although I haven't seen it before in these parts, according to Edible & Medicinal Flowers By Margaret Joan Roberts, recorded use of the edibility of the plant was documented in Java around 1862, so it's indigenous to the region. It has a local name Assam Susur and it's name implies that it is considered a sour fruit which usually means its used in cooking for that property but I don't see it's inclusion in, or recipes for it. I did find however that Ulicha Keerai or Gongura leaves are used in Tamil and Andra Pradesh cuisine, althouth its not quite the same plant but a close relative Hibiscus Cannabinus. The leaves are also used in Myammar cuisine where it's called Chin Baung Ywet.

The plant itself is quite pretty, it reminds me of that Red Okra I planted a couple of years ago which is not surprising as they are both in the Mallow family. The obvious next step is to try planting the seeds, there's an empty corner in the flowerd bed where a few might look really good and of course there's all these culinary things to do with it -check out this Roselle Granita.

Chinese New Year Flora

2011-01-27T11:37:00.007-05:00

Chinese New Year is about a week away. Chinatown in Singapore is transformed, there is peach blossom everywhere, the bright pink fake kind and crystal peach blossom lights have sprouted from the trees. The night market has increased tenfold, the crowds fiftyfold shopping for new year um, stuff. I survive the crush to buy myself some gaudy ang pow envelopes, gold peonies on red and bright gold metallic peach blossoms.

Much like Christmas trees, the cool temperate botanic symbols of this festive season just don't grow here in the tropics. Except the pineapple. Much of the symbolism of things here come from the double entendre of their meaning, so Wong Lai which means pineapple also means 'yellow(gold) arrives'. I discovered this when I asked why there were all these red and yellow paper pineapples festooning the restaurant we were dining in the other night. My dad came home from the market with a Pomelo today, a type of grapefruit, with another word play - 'to have'. There's also the kumquat - also 'gold'. The symbolism can of course be literal, like the bearing of fruit hence the local supermarket stocking up on huge potted fruit laden mini mandarin orange trees for 29.99. I was sorely tempted, I'll wait till after new years when they are on sale.

Coincidentally I found a book the other day Chinese Plant Symbolisms which I look forward to perusing but a quick peek to see if there was anything in particular about New Year yielded a surprise, an entire chapter on anti demon plants. New Year is a time for exorcism of demons apparently and useful botanic material for that include garlic, peach and bamboo. The spiritual roots of this Taoist festival is more about Yin and Yang, the eternal struggle between good and evil, and not so much about it's modern drive for luck and prosperity.

An interesting bit of trivia, bamboo used to be burned because it crackled and made explosive noises, which both frightened demons away and aroused the yang of spring- now substituted with red firecrackers.

Throwback Pink

2010-12-29T00:00:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year again, when Pantone announces it's color of the year- this time its Honeysuckle 18-2120 a dynamic reddish pink. Pantone go on to describe it as a captivating, stimulating color that gets the adrenaline going....... with a powerful bond to its mother color red, the most physical, viscerally alive hue in the spectrum.

The blurb didn't articulate what my immediate thought was on seeing the color- old fashioned, but in a good way. This is right on trend with the ever increasing nods back to a less complicated analog era, from throwback soul music to the runway and of course that TV show has contributed much to this.

It's certainly an old fashioned garden color after the recently popular schemes of black, and monochromatic shades of green. Pink doesn't really need unusual foliage colors for it to work well with- it goes well with the most basic and prevalent of garden colors- green. This pink however is not a pastel, it's further along the spectrum towards red so would jive well with yellows and oranges of a similar hue. Think 1950's floral dress.

Besides simplicity, the color is also more universal- it may be called Honeysuckle but the color translates to many other types of blooms. Here in the tropics a pink hibiscus has the same color read as the Rosa Carefree Delight I photographed at the Brooklyn Botanical Rose Garden. Others that come immediately to mind- pink Hyssop, Cosmos, Tulips and Sweet Peas.

Perhaps, next years summer garden should be less about the austere vegetable garden and a little bit more about the garden party- fueled by a much sweeter, goodness knows, honeysuckle rose.

Perfume Trees

2010-12-20T09:18:00.007-05:00

Sarina's Kitchen, a restaurant in nearby Mersing has a terrific aspect. The dining terrace, it's architecture and decor inspired by owner Mariam's vacations in Bali, takes full advantage of this with a stunning view of her property full of mature trees as it slopes away to the sea in the distance. Mariam pointed out a Nutmeg tree and then a Bunga Chempaka or Michelia Champaca tree. It was surprising to make that shift in perception from something you know only as something dried, ground, extracted, processed, and generally found in a bottle to something real, alive and whole.

I can't exactly recall if the flower was pale yellow which could mean it is a Michelia Champaca Rajiana or as the photo on the left seems to imply that it was white- in which case it would be Michelia Champaca Alba. Sensing my interest, she points out another large shrub- Bunga Kenanga or Cananga Odorata or Ylang Ylang pictured on the right. The blooms share a similar delicate spidery look.

Michelia Champaca is used in the renowned perfume Joy by Jean Patou. That single blossom in the pic that Mariam very kindly picked to show me scented our journey back home- it was amazing how powerful the scent was in the closed confines of a car. Although floral and perfumey it had an exquisite fragrance, one I would love to be able enjoy more regularly- I'm definitely on the lookout to own one of my own. The Ylang Ylang, on the other hand, not so much, it was strong and cloyingly sweet. Chandler Burr the NYtimes scent critic describes it as having almost a kerosene quality. It is however a popular component in many perfumes, most notably Chanel No 5.

Despite the fact that these trees are native to the region, sadly, to find them in a garden is rare. One reason is that fruit trees trump them, space is more likely to be accorded to a tree that can provide Mangoes or Jackfruit. Or, garden design here tends to routinely follows two paths- a 'chinese type' garden where there will typically be small ornamental trees like plumerias or pomegranates or a 'modern tropical' idiom of tropical foliage so its usually large palms and assorted 'bulk' foliage trees.

An unusual reason, as Mariam, explained is superstition- perfume trees are thought to attract spirits and unwelcome otherwordly creatures so they tend to be avoided. Eschewing all this, she enjoys as you can imagine the South China Sea air blended with these natural perfumes wafting in through the windows of her home. Her garden had many other delightful things which I must go back to investigate again - a couple of noteworthy ones- ceramic pots full of Centella Asiatica that she collected from the wilder parts of her property and a large posse of free ranging chickens some of whom were napping in the orchid pots.

I am keen to discover more of these fragrant floral and spice trees to see what they look like, what they smell like in reality as opposed to something in a bottle. There's a garden in Penang called Tropical Spice Garden and there's a Herb and Spice garden in Singapore on Sentosa Island that I must visit but otherwise the theme of perfume and spice gardens is surprisingly absent from most of the local botanical gardens despite its strong historical significance.

Botanical Remedies for Cold and Flu

2010-12-14T00:08:00.009-05:00

Last year, this article Don't Use Echinacea for This Season's Flu by herbalist Karen Vaughan intrigued me. This was mainly because she clarified a difference between immunomodulators which do not hype up your immune system and immune stimulants, like Echinacea that do. This year, this article in the NYTimes How not to fight colds, referred to studies made over the last couple of decades to conclude that it is not the virus that causes cold symptoms - it is the host's inflammatory response.

This goes against the logic of the plethora of alternative remedies out there that 'strengthen' the immune system but the language is confusing. What we want to happen is for our immune system to not overreact but to remain on even keel to function effectively. What we want is immunomodulation. We want to 'strengthen' but not stimulate. For that Karen recommends, among other things, Reishi and Astragulus.

In How to Treat Colds and Flu with Herbal Medicine she also recommends Miso soup with scallions before symptoms become pronounced, and Lemon Balm in a paste with honey but if you are actually coming down with something then there are some alternative strategies. If you are feeling more chilled than feverish you need warming diaphoretic herbs. This would include garlic, ginger, onion or galangal. In the early stages fresh ginger tea or eating sushi ginger in quantity can be helpful. If you are colder, then dry ginger tea, cinnamon chai (without milk or soy), garlic or a strong onion soup. Personally, I favor good old chicken soup with the addition of ginger, garlic, scallions and Shitaake mushrooms as regular cold season fare. I find that one of the first symptoms I usually get is a lack of appetitie and queasiness- so ginger and pepermint in tea is also in rotation.

I recently mentioned discovering Andrographis Paniculata. On a recent trip to Singapore, I found a store with a full department of Chinese medicine. Apart from a counter where there were herbalists taking and preparing orders, there were shelves packed with over the counter remedies. The cold and flu section was well represented with boxes of this herb in capsules. Here's a list of studies about this herb from the American Botanical Councils's herbal Library. Impressed by this, we now have two large pots of this herb in the garden- see pic above- it's just about to flower. If you were to try growing this, the time to harvest the leaves is just after they flower, so that you have supplies for the cold season.

Ginger Path

2010-12-11T04:52:00.008-05:00

My visit to the Ginger Garden at the Singapore Botanic Garden was mind expanding. Where do I start - perhaps with the stuff that I just didn't know before - Gingers as we generally know them are Zingiberacea, rhizomatous flowering herbs, but they are part of a much larger family - Zingiberales which includes Zingiberacea, Bananas, Heliconias, Cannas and Prayer Plants. It was surprising learning this but knowing this now and seeing them together in one place- there is a kind of visual order in the leaf and flower shapes that links them all. The range of shapes and color of the blooms and leaves and the variety of heights that the plants in this family make up on the other hand is - huge. This diversity and commonality as you can imagine makes for a fantastic idea for a garden. That's just aesthetically or botanically.

As it happens Gingers are also culinarily fascinating. There's root ginger which flavors things from curries to scones to Ginger Beer and your Chai at Starbucks. Then there's the related rhizomes Lengkuas/Laos/Galangal and the lesser ginger Krachai which are prevalent in South East Asian Cuisine. There's also Turmeric, where both roots and leaves are used. More unusual is the use of the finely sliced Torch Ginger flower particularly in the regional Malacca Nyonya dishes. Who knew that Cardomoms are also in the ginger family. Then there's Bananas for desert. What a great theme for a restaurant. Halia, the Malay name for ginger is that restaurant, and its right there in the Ginger Garden. Right about when I saw it and a variegated leaf Banana plant just outside it, my head exploded, because I love good ideas and this was a great one well executed. The significance of the banana leaf is that there were banana leaves being utilized for foliage color- from bronze to variegated- just stunning.

We have this strange potted plant at home with an unusual spiralling habit which I think is gorgeous and have been struggling to identify. Its a ginger. A spiral ginger or costus. Next door there's a strange plant with flowers that dangle over our fence. Also a ginger - a Globba Leucantha. We also have a huge Heliconia and a few prayer plants in the side border. I could see this side border getting a little more ginger friendly if I can find some Hedychiums and Calatheas and some Kaempeferias and that beautiful torch ginger -see pic on right. The Heliconias I saw were also far more subtle and interesting (see the variegated one on the left) than the ones seen in most gardens. The whole set of photos is here.

The information boards at the garden mention H. N. Ridley, who I have now discovered is an important botanist for the region who authored a large number of books and articles on local flora- I just added one to the vintage library- Spices. A quick scan of the body of literature he generated reiterates another botanic theme that is beginning to really fascinate - the native flora that once brought the Western World here in search of the novel, exotic and also the commercial and innovative- Ridley was influential in jumpstarting the rubber industry here. Culinary and medicinal herbs and spices, plant material for dyes, flowers for perfume, exotic woods are the reasons that once set ships a sailing to this region. Exotic, highly prized and valued. What a different 'place' this was from now where the perception is that it is where you come for cheap labor.

Ginger is said to to be an appetite enhancer, a mental clarifier and stimulant - my forays down the ginger garden paths have indeed done just that.

New Garden Lens

2010-11-28T23:58:00.012-05:00

Back in 2008 I posted about how, enamoured by the distortions and light leaks of Holga and Lomo cameras, I was on a path of digital processing and manipulatiing photos to emulate this elevation of mundane pictorial record to something that 'felt' more like a memory. Here's some of the many images I've worked on since then under the theme of 'botanic nostalgia.

I also said that although the process was labor intensive, working in photoshop with many layers - I preferred it to the scripts or software that allowed holga and lomoesque effects at a touch of a button. As of a week ago, this is no longer true since I discovered the iphone app Hipstamatic (which emulates the look of photos taken by the original Hipstamatic) which does, truly, a brilliant job of randomizing the colors and exposures to create quite beautiful versions of mundane subjects - see above. I have actually taken the exact same photos on my regular camera and tried to do the same with less successful results.

There's another app made by the same company called Swankolab which takes photos taken on your iphone (or ipod in my case) puts them through a digital retro darkroom lab to achieve similar results. You can also take one of your Hipstamatic prints and process them further in Swankolab. This means you have a variety of 'film' and lens' choices and then a variety of processes where each combination and the order in which you combine affect the outcome.

I am now officially a fan and they are legion. This past week the NYTimes published a series of War Photographs taken on an iphone using Hipstamatic on its front page which electrified the digital community who cheered the recognition of the medium as front page cover worthy. There's an interesting piece in the Atlantic about the artfulness about the medium referencing the Pictorialism movement at the turn of the century and the current iphone as art exhibition currently touring the country.

How 'good' the images are, are only half the story. The other half lies in the equipment itself, the iphone/ipod. I started a twitter account in spring last year with the idea that I could send out images that didn't require a narrative like they would in a blog post. I also thought it could be more documentary or chronological. That didn't really play out well as it required me to actually have my camera with me at all times and then I still had to select, edit (reduce the size, crop etc) before posting to twitter. I always on the other hand have my ultra slim ipod in my pocket and as this article about the new age of the connected camera explains, the 'processing' is entirely different- you take the image- if you like it you email it. In my case I email it directly into my flickr account where I then immediately blog it to my twitter account. This is game changing in this new age of micro publishing, blogging call it what you will especially for me as my main trade here is more visual narrative.

So add up portability, immediacy and artfulness and you see the potential of my new garden lens. Will it replace the tedious post processing that I've been doing? Absolutely not, because I just enjoy it in fact I've started experimenting with a combination of Hipstamatic, Swankolab and Photoshop. I also don't always process images, sometimes it's the old school decisive moment driven by opportunity and being in the right place at the right time. I am however loathe to get any more 'technical' with my equipment - I still use a Pentax Optio 750, now minus the protective shutter- it got stuck so I removed it as in ripped it out. Upgrading to a DSLR is crazy expensive and not a priority and I'll admit shallow as it is- I really don't like the look of those clunky things. At the grand price of $3.98 for both those apps I feel newly equipped and looking forward to energizing my twitter stream- which incidentally, the new version is integrated with flickr and allows instant views of photos if you click the photo icon on the right of the post.

**Update**
ipod got stolen- no more hipstamatic until they make an app for the android which is what I have now

upgraded my camera to a Olympus EP1

Modern Garden Aesthetics

2010-11-20T10:24:00.016-05:00

Despite having read, posted about and looked at a lot of photos of Patrick Blanc esque vertical gardens, have I actually seen one? Not in New york City, but last weekend in Singapore I spied my first one, pictured left, wrapped around the side of a shopping center on Orchard road. It was aesthetically beautiful and something registered at a cognitive level - a garden experience that somehow conveyed 'familiarity'- more about that below, and 'newness' maybe even a tad 'futuristic' but in sum total - it looked 'right' in a really cool way.

I've been noticing on my trips to to Singapore an interesting vernacular of garden design, botanic elements + ultra modern architecture, as a recurring motif in this city. It isn't necessarily just green city spaces, and those are well represented, but more about commercial buildings incorporating inventive garden elements as an intrinsic parts of the architecture. I'll do another post at some point when I have better photos to show - but here's one of a large building with substantial space allocation to balcony gardens- it was the scale that was surprising- those trees up there were pretty big.

For someone who leans more rustic and nostalgic it's odd to admit that I am attracted to and somewhat inspired by all this. This is mainly because there is something very apt about this aesthetic as a design response to the local environment and what is indigenous here. Vertical growth occurs naturally here. Many tree trunks are wrapped in a multitude of ferns and vines (orchids sometimes) even in urban settings. In the jungle, any vertical face would be covered with the same plus plenty of moss and lichen. In urban settings- an abandoned or dillapidated building can house an astounding assemblage of weeds growing out of the walls. I know this is a primary source of Patric Blanc's inspiration but it took being here to really make the connection.

I'm also just 'seeing' a lot of these kinds of gardens. The climate of year round heat and moisture allows for this kind of uninhibited verdant lushness- it doesn't take much doing or much time either to get a lot going on in a small garden space- or to cover a wall. The scale of things here- giant leaves, trunks and even roots (taller than me) and something about organic curvilinear things, scaled up and juxtaposed against geometric linear things, and you can see the potential of the botanic material part of this equation.

The other component is the non organic part- the buildings and architecture- in general most buildings are new and they keep building things and they all tend to be 'modern'. Here in Johor Bahru, public building is not any where near as described above about Singapore, but the private housing sector especially the wealthier enclaves have many buildings in this 'modern tropical' idiom with walled and balconied garden spaces. The picture on the right was one that really stood out where someone matched the gray trunks of a particular kind of palm tree with the wall echoing each others color and linear markings. I notice many other subtle and sophisticated uses of color, and shape to provide symmetry or contrast.

So, given the chance to work on a garden design here, would I want to go nostalgic and colonial or all modern and abstract? Hmm.

Orchid Batik

2010-11-06T00:16:00.013-04:00

I recently had the opportunity to do a batik painting, my first, and by 'do' I really only mean half the process which is the coloring in. The much more skilled part of actually drawing in the lines of wax, was done by the owner of the batik studio, Rashid. This part requires using a tool called the tjanting or canting which has a small container that holds hot wax and a spout. Controlling the flow of wax and actually drawing something at the same time is no mean feat.

Rashid's studio is in his garden, an open space without walls, a concrete floor and a tin roof, filled with long tables spiked with nails to position the fabrics. At the far end there is an assortment of dyestuffs and aluminum tubs for the pre and post preparative work. All along the side, between the studio and his house are pots of orchids, lots of them. When he showed me the two possible pre drawn fabrics that I could color in, an orchid and a hibiscus, it was an easy choice. The orchid looked roughly like the pale Phaelonopses that caught my eye walking in and I immediately thought, I could use that for reference for color. This wasn't so easy in its execution.

What colors do you want to use? he asked. A pale yellow/lime I said thinking about the color of the unopened bud. He went away to mix the colors, then came back to show me how to apply them. He used an electric lime to start the flowers and a bright emerald green for the leaves and a very deliberate use of water to produce a strong gradient effect with the bright colors. Not really what I had in mind and so began a lot more to-ing and fro-ing as he mixed new colors and I kept washing out and applying different ones to get a softer more complex color feel. He smiled politely, bemused by my preference for old aged colors and my disinclination for the vibrant ones but adjusted accordingly and by the time we got to the background, he got the pale purple I asked for pretty quickly.

Batik has deep roots in this part of the world. One reason might be that a key ingredient, damar resin, which is still used today, that raises the melting point and hardens the wax is from trees indigenous to this area. Sadly what might also have been a reason a plentiful source of plant based dyes, indigo, madder, turmeric to name a few have been displaced by the better performance of synthetic dyes. In Indonesia, although synthetic dyes are also prevalent, there is more adherence to traditional palettes and motifs and there is still plenty of the painstaking multiple resist and dye bath methods that create more complex batiks. Here in Malaysia the technique has morphed rather pervasively into this new batik shorthand of traced lines and one application of bright colors.

When I did get my batik in the mail, I really liked how the colors softened even more after the processing and I like how the colors resonate on silk. I thought I had made some fatal errors where some parts bled into others but the medium is quite forgiving, the mistakes much less apparent than expected. I'll have to pay Rashid's garden studio another visit, except this time, I will bring my my own drawing, a few different fabric choices, and a computer print of how I would like the colors to turn out. Now that should have an interesting result.

Smoke

2010-10-29T07:20:00.003-04:00

We recently experienced a few days of haze. What looked like a gray misty day was in fact smoke from forest fires from the neighbouring island of Sumatra. This is apparently a regular occurence caused by the clearing of agricultural land and an unpleasant one. There was a noticeable acrid smell, impairment of breathing and a disturbing visible omnipresence - an omen of the crisis we keep being warned about. Thankfully the other elements of wind and rain over a couple of days brought things back to equilibrium.

Curiously, I had only recently been thinking how I quite like the smell of smoke, of the gardening kind. What is now outlawed in most US cities, the burning of garden debris is still allowed here. It's a guilty pleasure walking around particularly at dusk and catching sight and scent of a gardener's small tidy pile of leaves and twigs sending up a curl of smoke. It is pure nostalgia, triggering memories of playing outside as a kid with a small fire sputtering in the corner of a garden. There also seems to be some peculiar olfactory recipe of dry and damp botanic material that makes it particularly reminiscent or particularly pleasant.

Smoke is also prevalent here in its use in worship. Outside of Catholic churches, Hindu and Buddhist temples incense is used pervasively by the Chinese who practise an amalgam of Taoism and Buddhism. Besides huge coils of incense as pictured above, hanging in the doorways of temples, small shrines are ubiquitous in restaurants, shops, gardens and porches with a pot of jossticks. It is also not unusual to see someone with hands clasped and stretched upwards, standing outside their home or shop waving a josstick, sending it's delicate smoky prayer, heaven wards.

Despite an interesting assortment of botanic ingredients neither the Chinese nor the Indian variety of incense appeal to me as something I might want to enjoy in the background as I might a scented candle. I do however like Japanese Cedar incense. When I lived in San Francisco, my little cottage perched on Potrero Hill which housed a few Japanese antiques somehow was the perfect venue for the occasional subtle scent of Morning Star Cedarwood. I also recently tried Juniper Ridge's Cedar incense wildcrafted from California Siskyou Cedars. These are less incense like, without added perfumey smells and more like a natural fire- much like the small garden fires described above that I've been reacquainted with.

To round off my ruminations on smoke, this weekend I will miss smoke of my favorite kind- the fake machine made kind. Most years I've been up in Mamaroneck where Jim has the best haunted house in the neighborhood replete with a full graveyard, rigged skeletons and other demons that sit up, bushes that rustle and the one that never fails to scare em- the letterbox that flaps (just when you think you've made it safely down the drive, and up the porch steps). All hand pulled behind the scenes and orchestrated by evil maestro with knife through head whose indoor staff whip into action on the cue of 'we have customers'. The outdoors staff (grave diggers, lost souls) drag shovels around and appear mysteriously. The smoke machine, a relatively new addition has been temperamental of late, hopefully it won't let down the attempts of evil Jim and his crew this year.

The Botany of Soap

2010-10-17T01:33:00.023-04:00

I'm having a bit of a crush on the Indian Subcontinent at the moment, as you can tell from my last post and the one about night markets. This one is about soap from the Kerala and Tamilnadu regions in South India, the main regions that the local Indians originally hail from. I bought a few the other day not realizing that it would lead to a discovery of the complex botany of Ayurvedic herbal soap formulations and some thought on the green and ethical issues that they raise.

Take the Kayakalp soap for starters - it has 23 botanic ingredients. Interestingly the website description of them has clearly had a language makeover, the printed paper insert in the box I have raised a chuckle or two - for Myrrh which 'kills germs found in filth' and Acoras Calamus -'to dispel the offensive smell of perspiration'. Right on- because you want that in a soap.

Medimix, the one with the motif on it, has 18 (including the same one above for offensive smells). They are certainly interesting- Licorice, Neem, Coriander, Black Cumin, Cumin, Wild Ginger, Vetiver, Rose Colored Lead Wort, and exotic - Indian Bdellium, Himalayan Cedar, Bawchi, Daruharidra (Indian barberry), Jyotismati, False Black Pepper, Indian Sarsparilla,Bitter Oleander, and China Root.

Does one need 18 or 24 herbs in a soap? With properties that claim to provide actions from antimcrobial, antifungal to anti inflammatory and solutions to dandruff, psoriasis to presumably athlete's foot the logic is simple, head to toe cleansing and disease prevention - from a single product. This is revolutionary talk in the context of perceptions and practises in the modern world. Could we end the mountains of dumped bathroom plastic, prevent the ubiquitous use of antibacterial chemicals entering the planet's water supply (creating increasing antiresistant strains of bacteria) and the energy sap of producing multiple packages and marketing campaigns to sell multiple kinds of soap? A single product to wash your hair and body and combat disease and save the planet? Heresy.

Thulasi Herbal Soap is starkly minimalist by comparison, just Thulasi (also spelt Tulasi and Tulsi) or Holy Basil. Interestingly some googling reveals that it is a little controversial to have what is revered as a holy plant used in a product for the rather base act of bathing (see removal of filth and offensive smells above).

Chandrika is one I recognize as being fairly well distributed globally- you can probably find it in a health store or Wholefoods in the US. Just two ingredients Wild Ginger and Lemon Juice concentrate. The smell is is also fairly pleasant which brings me to the first stumbling block of these soaps- they smell more hmmm than mmmm. As a loyal devotee of Verbena soap almost entirely because of its smell, its hard to get past the lack of chemistry with how these soaps smell out of the box. Not unpleasant, but I don't love them. Oddly there seems to also be a standard color chart approach for a particular shade of 'ayurvedic green' a couple of them being a very unherbal 'approved color' or numeric one.

One ingredient consistent through all of them is coconut oil, and the couple I've started using have a rich, easy lathering quality with a soap that remains fairly hard. Love that. The marketing however focuses on the other aspect of coconut oil - this soap contains no animal fat- intended for a Hindu customer who does not want animal fats in their products, which also translates well for Buddhists and Vegans. If I didn't think about this before, that most soaps contain tallow or animal fats, I just had my awareness raised and my preferences retuned.

I can't tell if they all are, but a couple of them are handmade which makes their cost surprisingly cheap, in comparison to the higher end, hand made, boutique soaps that have become increasingly popular on the American high street and in the malls like Lush and a permanent fixture on Etsy. It's been a few days now and the smell is growing on me a little and I'm loving the easy lather. Without knowing the exact formulations, which part of the plants were used etc etc, its not known how robust the medicinal claims are but there's certainly enough pluses in other areas to warrant my continued custom. As soon as I finish my bottle of shampoo, I'll be doing the head to toe test. Wanna try them too? Thanks to the wonders of the internet you can via Amazon - I've put together a little selection here. Unfortunately, only two of the ones I have are available but there are a couple of other similar ones.

Temple Flora

2010-10-12T04:48:00.007-04:00

There are Hindu Temples found in every city here with an astonishing amount of flora associated with them. At the temple gates I've seen banana trees with fruit tied to each side with palm and mango leaves strung across. Close by there is usually a handful of stalls that make available to the temple visitors, puja or devotional gifts or offerings to the gods. Each stall is stacked with trays of Betel nut leaves, Kaffir Limes, buckets of Lotus buds and a mass of garlands. Inside, the vendors ply their craft as garland makers expertly tying Jasmine buds, Chrysanthemums and Orchids into colorful scented garlands almost trance like, their hands in constant rhythmic motion.

The garlands are not restricted to just flowers, there are also garlands of leaves and grass. Each deity is said to have their favorite flora, Lotuses for Lakshmi, Durva or sacred grass for Lord Ganesha. There a rules too, for example, the Durva must be plucked while chanting continously and then cannot be brought home in your left hand or on your head. Each flower, fruit and leaf has its own significance and association, Jasmine for weddings, Neem leaves for the new Year. The simple philosophy that binds all this, that plants and flowers are celestial, pervades the oldest of the world's religions- although not strictly a religion. Along with the other tenet of Ahimsa or non violence there is something about this reverence for nature that seems powerfully relevant today.

Stumped

2010-10-07T02:13:00.000-04:00

The whole garbage thing is different here. There is some kind of recycling of specific things like newspapers and cardboard that goes on - it's a man with a flat bed truck and a megaphone who announces his presence in the neighborhood with a megaphone and you bring out your paper/cardboard and he pays you for them by weight. Otherwise, nothing else is separated and recycled. All garbage is then put out at the front of houses in cans or hidden quite elegantly in these concrete 'stumps'.

These renditions of tree stumps are really quite nice, and elaborate even. I'm not sure if they are prefabricated from a mould or if some artisan fashions the bark, branch stumps, etc in situ later once the structure is in place. There's various sizes and a variety of finishes from plain concrete - to the more elaborate staining with mossy bits like the one above. The lid can vary from metal, wooden slats or this organically colored plastic which lifts to reveal a deeper compartment than what is perceived from the outside.

Bitter Greens

2010-09-28T22:35:00.010-04:00

There's no accounting for taste. At a recent birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant, the birthday host announced with great enthusiasm the arrival of his favorite course, Bitter Gourd ( also known as Bitter Melon). Really? I'm pretty easy going with food and can manage most things but this vegetable, I despise, its so bitter. I don't get it, how can anyone 'enjoy' this. It's good for you, it has plenty of Iron my Dad always says when it shows up for dinner and I crinkle my nose. He's right, nutritionally, there's high amounts of beta carotene, potassium and iron, and there's some evidence that it has medicinal and therapeutic properties. I had it at a South Indian restaurant, and cooked with coconut and spices, it's more tolerable.

I discovered this interesting green at the supermarket, pretty like a giant clover leaf , see pic on left. It's bitter, but in the range of Water Cress or Broccoli Rabe and I've been enjoying it in soups and as a raw vegetable side. I've subsequently tracked it down from its local name (Pucuk Pegaga) to discover that it is in fact Centella Asiatica or Gotu Kula. The latter name is one that I've often seen in NYC health shops sharing shelf space with the likes of Echinacea, and Gingko Biloba, its claimed property- mental clarity. It seems the triterpenoids it contains has properties that benefit things from wound healing to insomnia.

I noticed a jar of dried leaves (pic on the right) in the kitchen and asked the maid what they were. I take it for coughs, she said. She walked me outside to show me the plant and said it's better to take it fresh- three leaves rolled up together and swallowed whole. It is wickedly bitter and a relatively common weed, I see it growing all over. It's Andrographis Paniculata, an ancient herb that's used in both Traditional Chinese and Ayuredic systems, also known as Indian Echinacea. There's evidence that it may be effective in the treatment of uncomplicated upper respiratory tract infection.

The taste perception of bitterness, has an interesting paradox, we are genetically wired to reject bitter foods as the taste frequently represents danger or toxicity. However, the phenols, flavonoids, isoflavones, terpenes, and glucosinolates in plants that are bitter can also, in small doses be beneficial. This dilemna, interestingly has different responses and approaches - in the west through selective breeding and other methods, debittering is a process often found in the food industry in response to the consumer avoidance of these foods rich in phytonutrients and therapeutic properties. Here in the east - bitter foods are regularly served and this is not including the already high rotation of bitter-ish vegetables like mustard greens and chinese broccoli and any protest usually met with- but it's good for you.

Lost Window

2010-09-21T11:02:00.009-04:00

I recently spent an evening at Lost Malaya, a gallery and lounge that owners Chris and Alisa want to make a social hub for creative locals to mingle, show and enjoy each others work. It’s housed in an elegant and beautifully restored colonial property thanks to their enthusiasm and tuned sensibilities for the aesthetics of this era.

Up in the lounge, large open windows on three sides invited the evening glow to spill in. Looking out from it’s slight hillside vantage, I experience much more than the languid sunset views over the narrow Johor Straits to Singapore. It’s a poignant glimpse back to the landscape of my childhood. A little way down this same waterfront street is the house where I spent my first dozen years, a little further down from that, the hospital where I was born.

In this landscape an eternity ago, I climbed Mango trees, made Lalang grass arrows and chewed regularly on Begonia flowers because I liked their sour flavor. I hunted for stray eggs in the Hibiscus hedge that the neighbour’s chickens would sometimes lay. Days would be spent collecting the bright red seeds of the Saga tree and the exploded pods of the kapok tree, to name a couple of things from the bounty of flora that provided the daily resources for play. The fauna of Cicadas, Emerald Beetles and Fighting Spiders provided even more.

Is the similarity of the salt water ponds landscape of Rhode Island to this one what drew me to spend time there? Even the Cape Cod wooden clapperboard houses stir memories of the tropical wooden colonial ones I grew up with. The landscape of ‘home’ fascinates me. I was stirred reading a post about personal landscapes to reflect on my adopted landscapes, both English and American. I remember acutely when people talk about this, like the Swedish house guest who also likened the watery Rhode Island landscape to his Nordic home or my Serbian friend who told me that on seeing the African Savannah landscape for the first time she felt without knowing why, that she was ‘home’.

The house we used to live in has mutated over the decades, the verandahs walled in, the property shrunk and denatured. The road itself is currently a massive construction site as they dig and build a six lane highway. The muddy beach in front of our house where I chased hermit crabs, and dug up green cockle clams, the sandier Lido Beach where we went to swim at the weekends, gone, buried under the harsh new landscape of ‘progress’.

As I write this, I’m googling and finding more formal ideas about Environmental psychology, scratching the surface of a subject of increasing interest with urbanization and climate change. I found this intriguing term - “solastalgia” a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home’ in the NYTimes article Is there an Ecological Unconscious?

The view out of the Lost Malaya window has triggered a less formal but revelatory insight, one that spans decades and continents. I do in fact have a personal landscape, with discernible components - wooden structures, ribbon strips of land and water, an environment rich with natural and botanic interactivity. I have in fact been ‘homesick’ all these years but this malady has responded well to an intuitive treatment plan of sojourns to Rhode Island and Cape Cod and gardening time in Mamaroneck. It’s a sad irony that this home sickness seems to be strongest now that I actually am, home.

Orchids

2010-09-12T21:31:00.008-04:00

Orchids, or certain varieties of them, do well in the cool, mild, San Francisco climate and my year long stint of living in that city was the only time I ever owned one. It was a gorgeous blue, perhaps this one. It was already in a mossy pot when I bought it and when I placed it in the mossy courtyard in front of the indigo noren that graced the front door of my Potrero cottage, it looked like it had always belonged there.

Here, orchids are native and ubiquitous, I see them everywhere. Our Phalaenopsis are blooming, all three of them. The first one, pictured left, was in bloom when I arrived four months ago, and still going strong. The other two are just sending out flower buds. The orchid on the right, an Oncidium I think, was just outside my room in Pulau Tioman.

There's a gorgeous almost black purple one in the supermarket which I might just have to get one of these days which means I'll have to figure out their strange cultivation. The ones we have at home are growing in a pot full of charcoal and crushed brick. I see them also planted in coconut husks and slatted wooden containers, it's all very odd. I'll be visiting a family member soon who is an avid collector of wild orchids, so I will get the lowdown on this.

In the meantime, I've discovered they make great subjects for floral portraits with their interesting sculptural shapes and rich variety of color.

Night Market

2010-09-04T12:21:00.006-04:00

Night markets are cool. Literally. Nightfall brings relief from the heat and glare of the tropical sun and the streets come alive with all kinds of commerce. I'm in Singapore just about to catch a taxi home but stray a little to find myself on the edge of Little India where the produce I saw a few weeks ago has overflowed onto the streets and drawn a large crowd. Bright fluorescent bulbs illuminate heaps of verdant produce. Walls and pillars of teal, pink, chartreuse and a myriad of colored canopies, buntings and signs paint a vivid scene. I'm surprised at how quiet it is. The vendors neither hustle nor hawk, the shoppers are focussed and deliberate, quietly examining, selecting and filling their bags and baskets.

Is that spinach? I ask a lady. It's Indian spinach she says, that's spinach pointing to another green next to it. The other green, although known here as Spinach or Bayam is in fact Amaranth, and has a slightly hairier texture than Spinach. I mull over its Indian cousin that I don't recognize, undecided. It's a huge bundle and I don't really want to be carrying too much through customs. Same reasoning occludes taking home the long thin drumstick vegetables. They look amazing and every shopper has some in their bag. I've had them before and can only a conjure up a fleeting mental sketch of what their taste and texture is like. I settle for some eggplants, those super cute little ones and get a free bunch of cilantro with my purchase.

A New Leaf

2010-08-24T10:31:00.015-04:00

What's the Malay word for Mint?, I ask my dad at the market, determined to get some this time. He walks over to the lady whose vegetable stand we're at and asks her if she has the herb you put in Penang Laksa. Why didn't I think of that- I've tried unsuccessfully describing it as crinkly, fresh tasting, the flavor in toothpaste- to blank looks. Penang Laksa, a Thai influenced riff on the local Laksa characteristically has mint in it. She deliberates, then points to some bundles, at first indistiguishable from the others in a huge pile, but I'll be durned, it's mint. This is the herb I was asking you about, what do you call it in Indonesia?, I ask the maid when we get home. I don't know, we don't use it there, she replies.

Interestingly the herb she does use a lot of is something called Daun Salam (the largest leaf in the picture) or Indonesian Bay Leaf. I've eaten it many times now in the dishes she's prepared but can't really tell you exactly what is it's unique flavor except that it's fairly complex, subtle, certainly not like a bay leaf, perhaps smoky and plays a visual role too like dark green Basil leaves in a tomato sauce. They don't seem to use it much locally here either, I don't think I've had it before now, which might explain why it's one of the few herbs she has growing in the garden to ensure it's supply.

We both however are familiar with Kaffir Lime leaves, Citrus Hystrix (the twin lobed leaf), but we use them differently. She uses them as an interesting accent particularly in a heavily spiced meat curry called Rendang which immediately distinguishes it from the local Malay version and also in a fried crispy snack with rice flour and peanuts. I use them in Thai recipes like Green Curry or Tom Yum where the leaves work with lime juice and lemon grass to broaden flavors that are all about sharp, sour and citrus. She says there are many trees in her village with this leaf. I remember first discovering lime leaves as a young boy on vacation in Thailand only because I remember my mother scrutinizing the dish, analyzing it's ingredients in the hope of recreating it when we got home.

Then there are Curry Leaves, Murraya Koenigii where we share some common ground- they are used almost exclusively in Indian curries. I learnt how to use them as a young adult watching Madhur Jaffrey on TV, she did working for an Indian family prior to working for us. I am tempted to experiment with this Ayurvedic staple as a replacement for Plantain in a salve given it's medicinal qualities.

In New York City I would buy kaffir and Curry leaves sealed in refrigerated plastic bags found in Little India and Chinatown. Here, branches of them are stacked in mounds and I can't help noticing the much enhanced freshness of their flavor. The Daun Salam on the other hand would travel well, it almost has no personality when fresh, only releasing it's essential oil when dry or heated in the pan.

I now discover that the mint I bought is Mentha Arvensis or Corn Mint, it doesn't quite have the brightness of flavor that Spearmint, Mentha Spicata does but a couple of bruised sprigs went straight into a glass of iced tea yesterday and I renewed my acquaintance with one of my favorite herbs. Today the maid asked what I wanted to do with the mint I put in the glass, she didn't throw it away, was I trying to grow it? No, but, hey, there's an idea, why didn't I think of that.

Cool Ferns

2010-08-15T04:58:00.009-04:00

Our front door is staged on either side with two tiers of potted plants. Two pairs of cascading slatted wooden stands and an assortment of potted plants, including some Orchids and Begonias but mainly Ferns. My grandmother's house had something vaguely similar also with a tiered assortment, but exclusively Ferns. This must be a tropical home and garden decorating standard intended to cool you down as you step out of the blistering heat into the shade of the porch and venture into the cooler shadowy interior.

It works and I think the ferns are key. The fine feathery greenery is visually cooling and the slightest breeze creates a soft rustle particularly with the two kinds I have pictured a Maidenhair Fern and an Asparagus Fern. There are also more sculptural ones like the Stag Horn and the Bird's Nest that help to create variety. It's also standard practise to take your shoes off before you enter so you linger a little while longer in this transitory space. A wind chime adds to the overall sensory experience.

I love the concept of an intermediate space- there's a Japanese word for this which I've completely forgotten - somewhere neither inside nor outside, but necessary for one to flow into the other. Everytime I stepped into the tiny space just inside my apartment door in New York City, I wished that I could transform it into one like this but of course nothing would grow in that dark windowless space. The trade off though is that the windows here are stark, heavy tinted glass often with heavy curtains to keep the sun and heat out, not at all like the views and assortment of interior potted plants I previously enjoyed.

Local Produce

2010-08-07T21:26:00.014-04:00

Apart from preparing the beds in Mamaroneck and planting some seed back in April, I've done zero vegetable gardening this year. There is a patch here at the family home that I'm sure I could utilize for that purpose, but I have had little inclination and the photograph above is the reason why. The local produce available is incredible. Despite my earlier thoughts on the price of growing vegetables where I rationalized the cost of commuting half an hour from New york City was worth the experience, I'm wavering somewhat now.

Within walking distance of home we have a fresh market, a supermarket and a night market (once a week). The produce is largely, vibrantly fresh. Go somewhere specific like Little India in Singapore where I took the photo above and you start to see the produce expressing it's target customers specific tastes. Apart from the Okra and those large black pod things that are Banana flowers ( they are used as a vegetable here), everything else is Eggplant. The Indian community relishes the subtle flavor differences and shapes of all the different kinds. For example the white ones are preferred in certain curries because of their more acid flavor. I've never seen those long green ones before and those purple ones are small, like purple eggs and beyond cute.

At the night market where the clientele is predominantly Chinese, the vegetable selection includes an intriguing assortment of medicinal vegetables. Alongside the more recognizable greens are bundles of unfamiliar odd colored and shaped leaves that are for making tonic soups. At the morning market, where I go every week with my Dad, we buy our vegetables from a Malay lady who quite shockingly cautions me not to select vegetables that she thinks are not up to par. Where are the vegetables from?, I enquire. We have a 'kebun' she tells me- a word that equally describes a garden or plantation so its hard to decipher the size of the operation or her methods (for now) but at least I know it's relatively local.

At the supermarket, the vegetables are more familiar as they have more information about them. I see signs for 'local' tomatoes and bundles of vegetables with stickers that say 'organic' or 'grown in Cameron Higlands' a cool highland area about 270 miles away. The prices here are the highest but are a fraction, perhaps a third of prices in the US. Shopping for vegetables here is liberated from a principal concern at my old haunt the Union Square Market, affordability.

With produce this fresh, varied, easily available and cheap - the urge to grow is virtually extinguished, but not completely. There are two things I'm jonesing for. Fresh (Italian) basil and mint. You just can't get it anywhere and I am dying for a tomato sauce pasta with fresh basil or a mint cucumber and yogurt salad. I'll have to order some seed and get going with that but one thing I won't have to worry about is when to plant it as the growing season is year round here. Yes, for added inner conflict, it's easier to grow produce here too.

South Pacific

2010-08-02T05:03:00.004-04:00

I just got back from spending a few days on Pulau Tioman, a two hour ferry ride off the east coast of Malaysia and famed location for the film South Pacific. It has a striking mountainous spine that drops steeply into an array of beaches and coves, that house a string of resorts each with a slightly different personality. Ayer Batang where I stayed was a rustic assortment of wooden buildings, some traditional houses, wooden chalets, bar shacks and veranda restaurants all threaded together tightly to a narrow path that hugged the shore.

The botanical experience of the place was eclectic. There were the tropical beach classics - palm trees, casuarina trees, mangrove trees but mixed with a jumble of crotons, orchids, ferns and all kinds of other flowers and fruit trees subject to the gardening taste and whim of the homes and resorts they resided in. All this in contrast with the dense rainforest that covered the mountain slope with a dark, slightly ominous, textural rhythm .

The flora existed synergistically with equally exotic fauna, families of Macacque monkeys huge Monitor lizards and Swallowtail butterflies. They darted through trees, slithered over the path and added another layer of color, movement and sound to this island garden.

Artemisia Vulgaris

2010-07-22T23:06:00.005-04:00

I recently underwent a few sessions of acupuncture, for the first time, for a sprained finger. In a nutshell, it worked like magic and was more painful and nerve wracking than I thought it would be. It was four sessions over 10 days, one component of which was the application of moxibustion, a lit herb cigar circled over the needles applied to my afflicted finger to further heat and heighten their effect.

This was one of the more pleasant aspects of the process beginning when the acupuncturist's assistant lit the moxa and its soothing aroma filled my cubicle. Although a little anxious during the first treatment when I had no real idea of how close that lit end was supposed to be to my skin, I soon learned to trust the assistant's judgement and enjoy it's marker as the midpoint in the treatment process. Suitably heated, I would then be left to allow the needles to do their work, the light switched off, the curtain to my cubicle drawn.

The Moxa I discovered is dried Artemisia Vulgaris, a common weed in the New York area, described here in nycgarden's excellent local weed atlas. Not only common but also pervasive, I regularly used to pull tons of Mugwort out of the beds in Mamaroneck every year. It's also one of the 12 weeds selected by ethnobotanist Ina Vanderbroek for the Quadra Medicinale installation imagining and demonstrating the possibilites of urban foraged medicine. NYC herbalist Karen Vaughan has more ideas on how to use this weed/herb including dream pillows and mochi. Ethnobotanist Nat Bletter shows how to collect and identify it here.

Herbarium image from Arizona State University, Woodblock image from a medieval herbal.

Towards Abstraction

2010-07-15T23:42:00.013-04:00

Having lived more years abroad than at home, the local flora often elicits surprise. Many plants that I am familiar with as potted plants living inside - reside outside here and are much much larger, sometimes unrecognizably so. They are large shrubs and trees, the scale of their parts defy recognition until, oh, wow. Recognition is also less immediate because they are less solitary, not just one plant in a pot but filling up half of a small border.

Take the Sansevieria for example. It's not uncommon to see this planted in pots here too, but they are occasionally let loose in a border mixed with other plants and in that context, they do something quite different visually. They become less sculptural and more like bold gestures on a canvas. Maybe it's the characteristics that help them thrive in the topics that create these visual textures. The foliage here is more rigid, leathery, more deliberate than the herbacious, lacier, kinds found in a temperate garden. Squint your eyes and blur them and you’ll see not an impressionistic Monet or Childe Hassam but an expressionistic De Kooning.

There is a small garden bed that I often see, bound within concrete walls where I took the above photos. There is a mass of purple Rhoeo Discolor, like brushstrokes of green and purple paint edged in fuschia where the sun catches it. A clump of Sanseveria looks like scrapes of a palette knife, gray greens shot with bright yellow. Both have a backdrop of Heliconia leaves, smooth painted areas with flurries of lines created by their stalks. All three have leaves that have begun to decay, but interestingly don’t seem as obviously dead or dying perhaps, due to their said characteristics, only broadening the palette by providing more yellows, oranges and browns.

Everytime I walk by ‘my’ abstract painting garden, I imagine filling the empty spaces with more daubs and strokes of botanic paint. I wonder what a small clump of black bamboo might do visually in the far back corner and some bold strokes of blue green aloe in the front. It’s odd that I’m nurturing a garden design here in my head, so different visually from the kinds I’ve been actively involved with all these years although it seems fitting that the aesthetic roots of these ideas are from my old home, New York City.

Young Red

2010-07-09T10:56:00.015-04:00

Our Indonesian maid asked me if I noticed that the lily on our porch had bloomed. She said it was Merah Muda, which is the Malay description for pink or literally translated, young red. Misinterpreting my quizzical look for misapprehension, she quickly added that in Indonesia they would say Merah Jambu alluding to the pink flesh of the Guava fruit (Jambu). Again it was qualifying the color red (merah) or guava red. The color pink it seems doesn't exist here or on the neighboring islands of Indonesia as a singular and separate concept, it's a sub category of red. I didn't misunderstand her, I was just parsing this and a bunch of random but connected thoughts swarming in my head.

My thoughts: First- pink (as I noted previously) doesn't really exist. How interesting that this is linguistically reflected here. Cantonese (fun hong) and Mandarin (fen hong), two other languages/dialects commonly spoken here also use red derivatives ( light red ) to describe pink. Second- the lily wasn't truly pink, unlike the begonia that is also blooming. It's really fine deep magenta lines drawn onto a white ground. But that's just me processing how I might draw or recreate this. Lastly, I'm finding that language is an interesting, additional botanic variable that I have to navigate here. What is this? What do you call this? I find myself asking a lot. It's not just the many languages, there are also ethnobotanical connotations to the flowers plants and herbs that shift not just what they are called but what they 'mean'. The question, what do you use this for? invariably follows.

Yes, I did, I said after all this made it's way through the circuitry. She elaborated that she had got the bulb from one of her friends. All the homes in this neighborhood have Indonesian maids and through the backyard fences they trade things like herbs, cuttings, phone cards to name a few. It's beautiful, I added and she beamed a broad smile. If you've grown something from a seed or a bulb and it turned into something that bloomed you would would have fully understood that smile, no translation required.

Bowl of Peonies

2010-07-04T02:34:00.006-04:00

Peering into this ceramic bowl decorated with Peony blossoms at the Museum I visited last weekend, was a poignant moment. I realized, I missed the Peonies this year.

The sheer amount of different flora here, the new scales and luxuriance of the foliage, the strange fruits and herbs have been distracting with their newness or the pleasure of being re acquainted with their long forgotten familiarity. This peony reminder was the first sting of sadness, a realization that there will be things that I will not see this summer and longer.

I wondered if the Chinese immigrants that sailed here with their peony and chrysanthemum decorated bowls found consolation in the floral motifs from the cool temperate homes they left behind. In a bittersweet way it fired up some creative urgency to do more of the floral artwork that I've been meaning to do. It also made me think, thank goodness I have this blog, it's my bowl of peonies and more. I can in a small way relive those delicious last days of May in Mamaroneck, go visit Wave Hill or smell the lilacs at Brooklyn Botanical.

Turmeric Root

2010-06-29T23:34:00.005-04:00

Turmeric is not an unfamiliar spice. Its color and earthy flavor is universally known as a component of curry powder or used individually in food preparation primarily for its intense yellow color hence it's moniker as the poor man's Saffron. Usually found in powder form, the fresh version I might find very occasionally in New York City's Chinatown. Here however, the small rhizomes are easily purchased from the markets and grocery stores. The rich saffron color is a surprise when you slice into the drab skinned root.

This article lists summaries for 200 recent peer reviewed studies on this herb spice. Clearly it's anti inflammatory, anti oxidant and anti cancer properties are of keen scientific interest, although it's effectiveness remains unclear. Herbalist Karen Vaughan's interesting article on Turmeric inspired me to try a mash up of the ideas she presented. Instead of using powdered, I sieved the liquid from a pounded turmeric root and stirred that into some local honey. Instead of milk, I stirred the turmeric honey into some live yogurt.

It was really quite nice, the earthiness of the turmeric (without the slight bitterness that comes with the powdered version) seemed like a natural fit with the local honey and the creamy custard color of the combiation was very appealing. I think there's potential here for an interesting smoothie with some frozen fruit.

Scary Beautiful

2010-06-27T22:12:00.008-04:00

Heading back to my hotel at dusk in Singapore's chinatown, I decided on a whim to make a detour. The golden light lit up one of the many old shopfronts down a sidestreet painted in an exquisite pairing of colors and I went looking for more. That's where I found an art gallery, painted in a striking deep coral with stripped wooden shutters, it's front yard crowded with a large Frangipani tree. Talk about exquisite pairings, the deep pink flowers riffed off the coral, the branches echoed the brown shutters but syncopated their geometry. I was mesmerized by the artistry of the pairing and wondered about it's provenance, was it inherited, beautiful happenstance or a series of considered choices by the artist who owns the gallery.

The next day at the Peranakan Museum another wonderful pairing with a different vibe. This time a yellow Frangipani that harmonized beautifully with the pale blue and green paint tones, the glossy leaves echoing the dark green ceramic banisters. This time the arch of the branches complemented the building's archways and the leaf detail plaster accents softened its contrast with the rhythmic lines of the building. What extraordinarily good luck to find two great examples of nature and architecture combined.

Despite the beauty of these Frangipani trees, they always arouse a sense of conflict with me, a quick search reminded me why. In this part of the world they are also known as the Graveyard Tree and it extends to the neighbouring countries too where they are also associated with ghosts, graveyards and funerals. Their branches apparently shelter demons, their scent attracting vampires. Silly, of course they don't. Since then I've seen the flowers threaded into Hawaian leis and known their familiar scent evoked in Nag Champa a hippie, counter culture essential. Walk down any touristy street, St Marks Place, New York City or Haight Ashbury, San Francisco and the waft of this popular incense is omnipresent. The positive associations abound and many homes here, now have pretty minature trees in pots. But still, it's hard to shake off these embedded childhood associations.

Rabindrath Tagore's 'The Champa Flower' captures the experience of this tree well, how passing under it you might find a fallen blossom and notice a scent that makes you look up. That might be the root of its legend as the scent is strongest at night and you're more likely to look up at the eerie embrace of its branches in search of the source of its rich (ghostly?) sweet smell.

Rattan

2010-06-22T10:19:00.008-04:00

There are a few local/native plant materials used here that effortlessly fulfill a growing global desire for products that are natural, eco friendly and sustainable. In the case of rattan, a fast growing jungle weed, a couple more labels can be attached, handmade and vintage/heritage. To this day the steaming, bending and weaving of canes requires an artisanal hand. The catalogue of classic designs made from this material is substantial- my particular favorites are steamer loungers from the thirties, french baroque pieces with woven inserts, mid century modern shapes like the one pictured and of course the iconic three piece tropical lounge set replete with tropical motif covered cushions. Add washable natural fiber cushion covers and latex cushions to the latter and you have another label, hypoallergenic.

The material is nowhere near as prevalent as it was in my childhood when rattan furniture was ubiquitous in almost every home, the wet markets would be filled with shoppers carrying rattan baskets to port their wares home where they also scratched their backs and swatted flies with gadgets fashioned out of this material. The baskets, it could be reasonably argued, are unnecessarily heavy in comparison to the plastics that have replaced them. However the airy design of rattan furniture, the dry cool touch of the material itself justifies a lament for it's decline and replacement with entirely inappropriate ( if not aesthetically then, certainly functionally) upholstered western style furniture.

I have to admit there are rattan pieces that I don't like - top of my list would be the wicker laundry basket that has become the staple of container and budget furniture stores everywhere. Therein probably lies the reason for the decline of rattan furniture here- it became too common and is percieved to be old fashioned and cheap. A quick search on the internets yielded a couple of designs that were pretty cool and certainly not cheap like this and these.

Water Pots

2010-06-18T09:18:00.003-04:00

Outside the terrace houses of Heeren Street, ( with the air wells I wrote about in my last post) there is typically, an assortment of terracota and salt glazed pots filled with an assortment of plants- everything from small fruit trees to large and small pots of foliage or flowering plants. What stood out were the pots filled with water and home to an assortment of lotus, water lettuce, duckweed and occasionally- fish.

The pots weren't extraordinary, usually terracota and they didn't seem to mind if the pot leaked a little as it all ended up in the monsoon drain in front. Or there were the green lined salt glazed kind usually decorated with dragons. On parallel Jonker Street, the antique stores had for sale larger, grander versions which I think were originally storage jars. I loved these two with botanic motifs on them- the hole gets stoppered with a giant cork. They were huge, stacked up, they almost reached the height of the doorway.

Interior Courtyard Gardens

2010-06-10T10:34:00.004-04:00

If I were to pick one type of garden that I would want above all others, I would without hesitation and unreservedly choose an interior courtyard garden, just like one of these pictured above that I saw in Malacca last week. The first two images were taken at the rustic guesthouse I stayed in, with a plumeria/frangipani tree, hanging ferns, bamboo and a mossy pool. It was a lush space with cool shadows, birds and flowers. I brushed my teeth 'outside' staring at a giant tropical blue flower that I did not recognize.

These aren't glassed in spaces with skylights, they are open interior gardens architected to break up long narrow terrace houses, bringing light and the outdoors into a private space indoors. The ground floor is usually a courtyard with chairs and tables or an extension of the kitchen. Upstairs, walkways wrap around and shuttered bedroom windows open out into these verdant air wells, the grander houses with not one but two. High ceilings and carved porous vents between rooms allow the air cooled by pockets of deep shadow to circulate with a little help from some strategically placed fans. Genius.

Sadly these exquisite ideas of space and light have been replaced with tighter, closed in, easy to air condition modern alternatives and these interior courtyards can only be found in places like Malacca and Penang, relics of another era. They are also an eclectic fusion of design and materials, a hybrid of east and west, drawing from Chinese and European Colonial architectural traditions.

Sour Fruits

2010-05-26T05:21:00.006-04:00

In the ayurvedic system, you are required to identify your psycho-physiological type and then to eat the kinds of of food that complement or enhance it. These foods then fall into the category of the six tastes, sweet, salty, sour, astringent, bitter and pungent. I've been reminded in the short time since I've returned how prevalent sour flavours are here in the diet. Apart from the frequent use of the local Calamansi limes and preference for eating both ripe and unripe fruits- things like mangoes are often eaten green and unripe and very sour, dipped in salt or salty soy sauce, there are also a number fruits that are used in cooking to specifically impart a sour taste.

On the right is Assam Belimbing or Averrhoa Bilimbing which I'm not so familiar with although its used in a variety of ways both cooked and raw. It has the acidity of a gooseberry and the mouth feel of a kiwi fruit. On the left is dried Assam Keping or Assam Gelugor or Garcinia Atroviridis which is much more prevalent and is used as a flavoring agent to make curries or laksas sour, particularly those that involve seafood. The most common sour fruit which I haven't photographed although I will do at some point is Tamarind, also known as Assam Jawa. You can probably deduce that the word assam means sour.

In the Ayurvedic pharmacology of sour taste or Amal Rasa, the properties of this taste stimulate the brain and digestive system. Translated into more western conventions, sour fruits are high in antioxidants and their acidic nature enables antifungal , antimicrobial, fat burning and even anti tumor properties.

Tropical Shift

2010-05-20T06:50:00.002-04:00

Well. Things have taken an unexpected turn. Due to family circumstances I have returned home to Malaysia indefinitely. So The Occasional Gardener takes on a tropical twist. On my first outing with the camera I found some great subjects in my dad's garden- the crabclaws, and also on the street outside- the mimosa, a weed. Some things don't change- I'm drawn to both plants in the home garden as well as the plants that thrive without a gardener. I also hope to be spending some time in botanical gardens and snooping on neighborhood ones too.

Rose Barlow

2010-05-14T09:50:00.004-04:00

I planted the seeds for Rose Barlow, last spring but she delayed her arrival to this one and it's been worth the wait. Tall sylph like legs and a pink puff of double petalled blooms, she's a marked contrast to the surly Black Barlow.

The clump of Black Barlow in the South West bed began petering our last summer - they seemed to have lost their vigor, barely making it to half their previous height. Moving a couple of the plants over to the North East bed seems to have re invigorated them- there's a couple of healthy new ones but I do miss the dramatic combination they made with the Spirea.

Rocking the Quarter Moon

2010-05-02T21:10:00.009-04:00

We finally did it- the quarter moon, a small quadrant patch that's been left for years unplanted mainly because I couldn't really figure out what to put in it is now 'done'. I finally figured out what to do with it after piecing together two things- the two stone/concrete planters pictured above, have spent a few years happily housing some succulents that thrived there on bare rock and a pinch of soil. Succulents it turns out are also Heidi's favorite plants, she always oohs over them at the nursery. It made sense then to just turn this whole area into a rock garden with succulents with the added practical addition of the woody herbs from the vegetable garden, that don't always make it through the winter. Two of them have done really well for a few years, the golden oregano and the lemon thyme and it hasn't escaped me that they thrive on the very edge of the vegetable beds which probably keeps their feet nice and dry. So dry + stony + succulents + woody herbs = mediterranean, desert-ish low maintenance rock garden.

Easier said than done, we had to dig fairly deep to make sure it was going to be well drained- this part of the garden gets a lot of water when it rains hard. Some frantic googling and reading to figure out how to prepare the bed for maximum drainage- and I wanted it to slope so- we had to wrap our brains around that. Then we had to get the stones and rocks. With Jim's expert guidance- I decided to mix 3 different kinds of stones to emulate the color variation that's occuring in the walls. It was no mean feat explaining to the nursery staff that we wanted to mix the stones and then only wanting 3/4 (not a half or a full yard which is 'how they do it"). Jim set the edging stones and I experimented with different recipes for mixing the stones- to get the 'look' right- its's amazing how difficult it is to get something to look 'natural'.

The planting was easy- herbs towards the front and succulents everywhere else. I echoed the range of color thats in the other beds a range between dark burgundy succulents and lemony lime greens. The result- it rocks- it finally finishes that part of the garden so at a macro level it works really well. What I didn't anticipate was the effectivenes of the scale- although I planned that it would be almost a minaiture garden, I didn't fully appreciate how attractive this would be and how it slows you down and makes you take it in more closely.

Tamed Violets

2010-04-26T12:24:00.006-04:00

Every year when I start to clean up the beds in spring, I find a wild violet in the vegetable beds - more or less in the same place. I always hesitate pulling it up. It's demure prettiness and reputation from Shakespearean Sonnets to being one of the flowers Emily Dickinson asked to be buried with make it difficult to percieve this flower icon as a weed.

So this year, for a change I put it into a tiny pot, mulched it with some moss (another piece of garden debris) and it's been enjoying a renewed status on the window sill the last couple of weeks. It sulks when it's not watered but revives instantly and it was nice to have those pretty flowers to enjoy for another couple of weeks.

Speaking of Emily Dickinson, I'm really looking forward to the exhibition at the NYBG The Poetry of Flowers- what a lovely idea to combine a recreation of her 19th-century New England garden with audio of her poetry, exhibition of her watercolors, photographs and discover more about the gardener who became a poet.

+ OGMedia: The Making of Emily Dickinson's Garden

Spring Line

2010-04-16T10:59:00.012-04:00

I zipped on and off the High Line yesterday since I was in that part of town to see what was happening, racing through it as I had to catch a train. Two things caught my eye, pink tulips just because they were pretty and the daffodils above. According to the High Line plant list they are Narcissus Hawera and they now join the vintage Van Sion on my extremely short list of daffodils I would actually choose to grow. The Van Sion makes the list because of its unusual green color and dense double texture, this narcissus would be because of its adorable daintiness. Tiny pretty flowers on tiny clumps naturalizing easily in clumps of grass. They were also the perfect scale for the somewhat limited space of the high line.

+ OccasionalOasis: Passage for Two

+ OGMedia: 10 Great Gardening Apps

+ GreenKraft: Hydroponic Herb garden

Early Spring

2010-04-03T15:38:00.005-04:00

The Forsythia around Mamaroneck is already a gaudy show painting the early spring landscape with broad brushstrokes of bright yellow. Its a conflicting appreciation of instant color and then visual overload. I learnt last year however that this actually makes for an interesting backdrop for photos, given enough distance to provide a blur of color.

Here, tight magenta Rhododendron and red Maple buds contrast nicely with the vibrant yellow of a Forsythia hedge. This early spring palette has already progressed quickly to richer warm colors. Just last week, on a cold but sunny morning I squinted at some pale fragile Magnolia blooms against a cold blue sky. Today, warm and sunny, I weeded and tidied up the garden taking in the purplish shoots of the Indigo, the red fronds, shoots and stems of Bronze Fennel, Euphorbia and Berberis. Color is back.

+ OccasionalOasis: New Zealand

Green Age

2010-03-19T10:25:00.005-04:00

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Dylan Thomas

We are having a spectacular transition to spring with temperatures in the sixties. I only recently discovered this excerpt from a Dylan Thomas poem which really articulates for me the sense of energy that comes with spring- like a current crackling through roots and branches exploding into leaves and buds. It surprisingly bookends my post at the end of last summer- fleeting green. In the photos, the reverse is in effect- I couldn't help thinking that the shadows on the lawn looked crisper because the grass seemed a lot greener than I remembered. Everywhere in the garden green things poke their heads through the dull winter palette. At last the green age of spring.

+ GreenKraft: Farm Tables

March Tempest

2010-03-15T16:19:00.004-04:00

A March tempest roared through Westchester over the weekend, taking down trees, ripping down powerlines, flooding yards leaving many homes struggling to deal with its fury- flooded basements, damaged homes and power outages. I saw two homes with trees crashed through them and curiously noted that they were both Pines. Apparently evergreen trees that carry their foliage are heavier and therfore more likely in rain soaked and windy conditions to fall. I did see another tree- maybe an apple tree uprooted and toppled over due to the thawed snow and and rain drenched soil allowing the winds to unearth it- but the huge Pines crashing through houses- yikes and duly noted.

Pushing Through

2010-03-10T16:43:00.003-05:00

These crocus were a lovely sight, a little patch that had spilled over beyond someone's garden in Mamaroneck. There were more in the garden under the trees albeit not quite as spectacular as the ones I saw in Brooklyn a couple of years ago. Nevertheless it was still uplifting to see the season beginning to push through into spring.

Stirrings

2010-03-07T13:13:00.003-05:00

Up in Mamaroneck, two things stir the gardening impulse. Bright green chive shoots emerge in the vegetable garden to kick the year off. Later in the year they will drive me crazy keeping them in check, but right now they remind me of how dependable a tenant they are here. The other is the Schlumbergera which was in a sorry state last year and got a long overdue repotting. This year it returns the favor with a mass of fuschia blooms.

Right Minding

2010-02-22T10:54:00.013-05:00

The tediousness of the left brain chores I am currently mired in, has my right brain parched. Circumstances don't help either- trapped in a seemingly unending winter, there's little outside that inspires - it's just grimy snow and salt frosted sidewalks. Last night I dug out some old footage from a year ago that I took down at the South Street Seaport for a little respite. It was from a cold February day but the sun was shining and the sparkling undulating Hudson river was mesmerizing. If you've watched Jill Bolte's Stroke of Insight, you'll know what I mean when I say it's moments like this that unlock that right brain and allow you to enter and become part of the everyday nature that surrounds us. Until you allow the outlines of the piers boats, people and the city itself to infringe on your perceptions, you are immersed in an oasis of waves and sparkle.

+ OccasionalOasis: Stone River; Sparkle

Seeds

2010-02-13T09:39:00.003-05:00

Not the garden variety. I have a pair of abstract encaustic paintings titled Seed that I've appropriately decided to seed my new Etsy shop with. It will be a place for me to sell artwork and perhaps some things for the home, some vintage things - all with a nature or garden aesthetic.

The paintings have an interesting creative path. They started as digital studies created in photoshop. I was at the time exploring layering in photoshop with colored/tinted water textures. Layering in photoshop requires pretty much the same kind of eye or skill as you might need for the physical medium of watercolors adding, subtracting, translucent colors until they are right.

When I started working with encaustics, another medium with translucent qualitites - I thought this would translate well. So I started with a current digital medium and then back a to medium that dates back to Roman and Egyptian times. I animated the layers of the digital artwork to make a short video go take a look and compare.

Rejuvenated

2010-02-01T16:29:00.009-05:00

While NYC dips into temperatures below freezing again, I continue to work on designs for Summer 2011 and thought I would share an interesting trend prediction from Li Edelkoort's recent presentation - water. Not just aesthetically as in color palettes drawn from rivers, reefs, pools, oceans, mermaids and the like but also conceptually- as a symbol of rejuvenation.

She says it is now time to open the sluice of creativity and let flow the new ideas that we have held back for too long. Yeah! With gardening there's actually been a few years of fairly visionary new ideas - vertical gardens, hydroponics, skyscraper and rooftop farming to name a few- now its the creative turn of the entrepeneurs and manufacturers to turn these ideas into broader commercial solutions and the public to try them out.

Water in the garden is obviously subject to either circumstance, you live by water or your preparedness to create a body of water. There is however a wealth of ideas for a more common situation - the damp garden, why improve a soggy part of the garden when you can fill it with primulas, irises and other water loving plants instead. Go take a visual trip down by the water and there's more at Beth Chatto's Garden.

Last year at Kmart I picked up a water lily growing kit in their garden department and pondered whether I might try growing it in a container of water with things like umbrella plants on my window sill. I decided against it - but maybe this year.

Turquoise 15-5519

2010-01-29T21:42:00.008-05:00

I just got round to noting Pantone's color of the year for 2010 - Turquoise 15-5519. My first garden related thought about the color was- Kyles' pot. Kyle, an artist friend living in Rhode Island that I visited while on vacation this year had the most beautiful collection of ceramic pots dotted all round her house all of which I photographed badly- they were all blurry except this one- the large turquoise planter she had strategically placed in front of her orange front door. Her painterly eye coordinated an eclectic mix of plants with a palette that worked particularly well, lit by the evening sun.

I like the implications of this color for garden inspiration because it suggests ideas for spaces adjacent to the garden and those indeterminate spaces between the inside and outside- turquoise planters on porches, a painted or tiled wall, a courtyard, outdoor furniture and also using a focal color accent. I also like that it suggests more exotic locations- Chinese ceramics, Moroccan tiles, Caribbean Shutters.

Flower colors that complement would be tomato reds, oranges through to yellows. Wouldn't currant tomatoes and swiss chard and nasturtiums look yummy in a turquoise pot. Foliage with a blue cast like succulents would work well and I'm really liking how that black coleus looks in the photo.

Verbena Notes

2010-01-26T15:11:00.011-05:00

I love Verbena Bonariensis. I love the lanky stilt stalks - see how they catch the evening September light here ( taken at the NYBG ). I tried last year with seed sown directly into the beds. Nothing showed up. I had them in my London garden and they were phenomenal, tall, thick clumps but still airy and lacy and able to thread through all kinds of other plants. Note to self- research this a little more and try again this year.

I also love the smell of Lemon Verbena, which is in the same family but a different plant Aloysia citriodora. It's my regular soap, and occasional candle. It's the primary botanical scent that gets me through the winter and without doubt its uplifting properties are a big help. I always pass it over when shopping for herbs for my Harlem window sill because it grows fairly large and shrubby. Note to self- grow it in a large terracota pot this summer in Mamaroneck.

How Will Your Garden Grow?

2010-01-14T16:09:00.012-05:00

Back in 1998 I bought a computer- a Mac. I patiently waited for AOL dial up to get on the internet, struggled through a manual to learn Photoshop and breathlessly read Wired magazine's predictions about what this all meant for the future. Would all this technology really allow me to unplug myself from the corporate world, create a micro enterprise, self publish and interact with people in extraordinarily new ways. Yes, it really did. Certainly not as quickly as the pundits were predicting and no fortunes have been made - yet. I have this strange deja vu feeling that there's a change cycle about to happen again and I got that feeling shortly after I got my droid phone.

Just through the filter of being a gardener and more importantly as a gardener blogger- I get this sense of a sea change of how I might be doing things. I'm late to the party- couldn't quite get worked up about the iphone but now that Google are tearing into this I'm so on board. It's probably going to be awhile before the apps arrive where I can identify edible wild plants but I can already scan a bar code for a seed packet and search for a better price online or google something right that minute outside (and I like searching with my voice- not typing). I can get surprisingly good results with the camera. I just downloaded an app that turns it into a voice recorder. I love being able to read emails on a subway platform or flipping through something pretty.

Its not just phones, its tablet type things too- things are changing, everyday. What I do in a garden, how I create garden inspired content is going to change in 2010.

New Year Star

2010-01-05T14:54:00.003-05:00

I went up to Mamaroneck on new year's day for a party and was charged to gather up whatever I could from the garden to spruce up the festivities. A quick walkabout yielded some red berries that went nicely with some pine branches. Then a range of dried hydrangeas and dried alliums made quite a pretty vase in a subtle wintry palette -the hydrangeas still had a tint of color- unfortunately I didn't get a good picture. But best of all and most surprising of all- the Star Magnolia was full of buds. These had been moved around the previous year, sulked last year and it looks like they are back with a vengeance this year. A good augur on the first day of 2010.

+ OGMedia:One year in 120 seconds

Bleak Beauty Redux

2009-12-26T21:52:00.003-05:00

Last year, I worked on this winter hydrangea image which then led to a couple more in a certain palette of yellow/green/brown cast neutrals inspired by Andrew Wyeth's palette and then it picked up an indigo ink tinted scheme. The more graphic motifs/images created by a blank snow canvas against the stark winter flora started to take on a feel of Japanese Prints. I liked this a lot and this year decided to do a couple more and I've put them all together in one place- a digital book called Bleak Beauty.

I like how it captures an important strategy for the coming winter months- think beautiful thoughts. Freezing cold weather is much more tolerable re imagined as a few graphic ink strokes in shades of indigo. The images also track a year of developing this kind of image making process- textured, digitally manipulated photographs. Putting them in a book format on the Issuu platform is also a new way of creating short narratives or visual moods that I've been exploring.

I recently got an Android phone and Issuu just released a mobile version for Android, so this book is optimized to view on a phone. I've also made some of the images available as free wallpapers- mainly because I wanted some for myself. I'll post again on this subject but there's definitely a different world of media distribution that's happening on phones. This blog is slow and hard to navigate on a phone, can't watch the videos- the digital book- where you just finger swipe to the next page- almost perfect.

Plantago

2009-12-21T14:53:00.008-05:00

I recently ordered some Plaintain Oil to make some salve with. The oil is from the leaves of Plantago Major or Common Plantain. I've been reading many references to its use as a vulnery (wound healing), it's anti inflammatory properties and abilities to draw out bites. The latter is indicated in the 15th century woodcut of it above - I presume that's what the significance of the scorpion on the left is.

It's one of the 12 common weeds selected for the Quadra Medicinale project- which is when it first drew my attention. Then this post by a NYC herbalist intrigued me further. Although the claims by ethnobotanists and herbalist are strong the evidence so far that I can find are weak or considered insufficient.

Still worth a shot though and having trialled a few salve and ointment recipes and now happy with the actual base ingredient/combination, I'm ready to move on to adding the herbal ingredients. I do really like the weed/ common availability aspect, although using an oil now, I might consider trying out a fresh leaf version next summer when its pretty much everywhere.

+ OGMedia:Beth Chatto

Evergreens

2009-12-16T18:47:00.012-05:00

At the farmer's market, this week there were beautiful evergreen wreaths, branches and trees to celebrate the season. The word evergreen is beautiful and hopeful, the colors, especially when things are getting fairly wintry, uplifting and the scent is transporting.

Evergreen trees immediately suggest landscape, not only as motif, but also scale- you notice the expanse of sky and the mountains beyond or whatever else is in the image. I went back to take a look at that image of the large pine at Wave Hill which then inspired me to work on another image of some snowy pines in the Catskills I took last year. I really like this waxy, blue green tint- I might have to go to the NYBG and take some more photos in their conifer arboterum to work on in a similar vein.

I recently discovered Juniper Ridge Siskiyou Cedar Incense. I love that the product is wildcrafted and as they describe it themselves- it's not perfumery- it just smells like a crackling fire in the great outdoors and in this case a particular California landscape. I also recently discovered Tallba Swedish Pine soap, beautiful scent and detail on the soap and the packaging is gorgeously vintage. Coincidentally I was intitally drawn to the Juniper Ridge incense at wholefoods because of it's elegantly stark packaging.

All this evergreen goodness is also put together as featured supplies to kick off the newly revamped supplies section of this site.

Contemplating Berries

2009-12-12T16:08:00.009-05:00

I don't know what kind of berries these are, maybe Hawthorn. If they are then they are edible, full of nutrients,vitamins and minerals according to well known NYC wild foods expert Wildman Steve Brill. He also says they have medicinal properties and can be infested with insects. But I don't know if they are Hawthorn berries and in truth, besides my general lack of knowledge of berries, I also have a learned or conditioned response to these tantalizing, colorful things as - poisonous. Clearly these are not as I see birds eating them.

I wouldn't normally dwell on the subject but as the topic of urban foraging and the information about it increases, it's an interesting notion to think about the abundant availability of food and medicine, free- Central Park is full of them. In scarce times, not to mention it's relevance to local, carbon footprint issues etc it's a fascinating and timely subject. It would be fantastic if you could take a picture and something like Google's Goggles or some other app could tell you what it was, was it edible and whether it was ready to eat. In the meantime, I'm hunting and gathering as many foraging blogs and twitterers that I can to learn more.

+ OGMedia:Berries in the Fall

+ GreenKraft:Fallen Leaf Plates

Late Autumn Walks

2009-12-08T00:26:00.004-05:00

After months of not being able to walk in Central Park with my fosterdog because he was too dog reactive, the situation reverses. He's now come along with his training far enough to start exposing him to more dogs so we now take about four long walks a week- from 110th st to 80th st and back. He has mixed feelings about this new enterprise - half of him really likes all the interesting new stimuli, half of him is wound tight as a spring dealing with all these 'scary' dogs.

I, on the other hand am thrilled to be regularly immersed in the late autumn landscape. I watch gangs of birds feast on plump berries. I see Gingko foragers stooped to collect the foul smelling fruit that they prize. There is some pale yellow winter jasmine in bloom. The landscape is painted with a fairly broad range of colors still, there's greens and yellows and berry accents that keep the more sombre monochrome of dead leaves and stark branches in check.

Fruit leaves

2009-11-29T15:03:00.004-05:00

I love Tangerines and I couldn't walk by a box of them in Chinatown, still with leaves intact without buying some. There's something that cognitively suggests freshness and ramps up the desirability for me when I see leaves on fruit- I want them more. I grew up climbing fruit trees as a kid and remember the smell of the leaves that sometimes had a faint suggestion of the fruit itself. When I see them now, it somehow refreshes this memory and I'm investing in more than just the fruit. They don't last too long either. They get dry and brittle fairly quickly so having them still green and supple is a good measure of how fresh the fruit is.

Fleeting Green

2009-11-24T09:07:00.004-05:00

After it's abundance all summer, green in the fall garden, as it retreats becomes an interesting color accent. Not the blue cast of evergreens that start to become more apparent now as things around them die down, but the chlorophyll pigment of leaf greens that won't quite let go and insist on being part of an array of autumn hues. I love this palette of greens and browns, and all the colors in between, as you can probably tell from this site. It's a palette I want to bring indoors to sustain me through the winter months until it re emerges next spring. I just updated the about section with some new videos about the Arts and Craft movement- see how predominant this palette is in their work.

Persimmons

2009-11-21T21:54:00.004-05:00

At this time of year, Persimmons are easily found on the streets of Chinatown, I always buy a few, not for their flavor so much as their looks. Such a beautiful color and shape- and that dried calyx on top- like a fine carving. I love to have a bowl of them just to look at. One reason the flavor is an issue is I often mistake the two kinds- Hachiya and Fuyu. The former you can't eat until they are completely ripe and the other you eat while its still fairly firm. I never remember which is which and bite into the acorn shaped hachiya and spit out its bitter tanin that lingers for hours. The photos above are fuyu. The tree is also beautiful- there's one at the Brooklyn Botanic.

+ OGMedia:Plot

Autumn Palettes

2009-11-16T15:27:00.002-05:00

Autumn is a great time to go foraging for color palettes. I find color juxtapositions, pairings, and contrasts that surprise and inspire. Here are two good examples, a few remaining fiery orange leaves set against a dusty blue background, cris cossed with neutral branches and a dusty pink hydrangea separated from a vibrant blur of oranges by a range of leaf hues from green to yellow. Both of these have information for textile designs but I rarely use them that directly. Mostly its subconscious, the information composts and feeds something down the pike.

Upside Down Tomatoes

2009-11-13T12:26:00.000-05:00

No, not the growing kind. I tried this last year with good results, so this year there was a serious display of all the tomato plants still with fruits attached cut and hung upside down in the window to ripen. Added to this was also some basil plants and some chili plants. It was really pretty and since this picture was taken a couple of weeks ago, we've had quite a few ripened tomatoes and chillies that were pretty good.

Suburban Foliage

2009-11-03T00:53:00.005-05:00

I've been to Mamaroneck the last 2 weekends, the first weekend my camera had issues and I ended up borrowing Jim's camera. I was only able to download the images the following weekend when my own camera became issue free and I took more photos. That's my excuse for a lull in posting.

Here's one image from each weekend that captures the much more spectacular foliage color changes that occur outside the city. The range of color is also terrfic and I have a series of autumn palettes that I will post but this first one is in the classic yellow red vein. Remember the pinks and purples from last fall?

+ OGMedia:Dancing trees Singing birds

+ OccasionalOasis:Building With Whole Trees

Urban Autumn 2

2009-10-20T15:18:00.004-04:00

I managed to squeeze in a quick walk in Central Park a few days ago and enjoyed another view of an updated Urban Autumn except more biased to the autumn part. This time the Manhattan geometry was well in the distance framed by autumn golds, the human crush whittled down to a jogger or bicyclist or two and outnumbered by berries. Much better.

+ OGMedia:New Urbanism

Bittersweet

2009-10-11T13:19:00.005-04:00

The sight of these bittersweet branches hung on a line on the side of a truck in Union Square market stopped me dead in my tracks. It wasn't just their stark sculptural beauty, it was the contrast of their organic curving forms against the geometry of the trucks rivets, the intensity of the oranges and yellows against their monochrome shadows and the flat white paint. There was also something ancient about them that contrasted with the industrial modernity of the metal wall and line. On a table in front of this uncontrived and thought provoking wall art a pile of them pulsated the vibrant yellows and oranges of fall. There is always this strange thrill about fall in Manhattan, and this was definitely one of those moments.

Autumn Flotsam

2009-09-29T14:41:00.004-04:00

It's eyes down, here in Manhattan as the pavements get strewn with Autumn flotsam. Acorns, leaves, seed pods and twigs litter the urban floor. Sharp yellows of turning leaves decorate the dull gray concrete. The crunch of dry twigs and seed pods add an autumnal nuance to the urban percussion of foot traffic. I have some acorns left over from some twigs I picked up a couple of weeks ago. This morning I picked up a couple of seed pods from the many honey locust trees in the neighborhood. Their dry brown tones counterpoint the mauve blue flowers of the Plumbago that is now blooming quite profusely indoors.

+ OGMedia:Mannahatta

Small Mercies

2009-09-24T13:05:00.005-04:00

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Everytime I think today will be day I run out and indulge in a little garden photography, it clouds over or rains. My foster dog is highly dog reactive, walks in central park are out of the question but long walks are necessary since he is young and spirited, so recreation time is taken up by long urban walks where we can take refuge behind a parked car if we see other dogs. Work and volunteer work keeps postponing a day up in Mamaroneck.

I will settle for some small respite I tell myself, just a little tiny something, and on cue my Euphorbia Milli blooms. Small tiny exquisite yellow flowers. I move the pot closer to my desk so that I can gaze intermittantly at it. Outside on the fire escape my Chinatown Chillis begin to bloom. They have grown from the seed of small but fiery Thai Chilli Peppers from Chinatown. Cleaning out the vegetable tray of my fridge in spring I found a couple of stray shrivelled up peppers. Why not I thought and took them up to plant in Mamaroneck. I brought a couple of the seedlings back to NYC and they have grown into fairly interesting plants- tall and fine leaved with delicate white flowers.

+ OccasionalOasis:Parallel Lines

Urban Autumn

2009-09-19T21:34:00.005-04:00

The first signs of the approaching fall usually start with the arrival of Gingko leaves, delicate little yellow calling cards outside my front door announcing the inevitable. This year the signs were harsher, a week or so ago the pavement was littered with acorns and small oak branches ripped off in recurrung bad weather. Today, on the first day of fall walking around downtown Manhattan I noticed some crab apples on smaller obviously more recently planted trees. To be honest they didn't really look in the peak of health. Then there was the glimpse of a single red berry through a gap in a swathe of construction fabric. Fall is off on a slightly grim start this year and maybe all these visions of vertical gardens and skyscraper farms has made the actual reality of urban nature a tiny bit underwhelming.

+ OGMedia:Makoto Azuma

+ OccasionalOasis:Suddenly, Last Summer

The Price of Tomatoes

2009-09-12T16:17:00.003-04:00

I've discovered that late in the season, if I go down to the farmer's market late in the afternoon, I'm able to buy heirloom tomatoes at a great price. There's a particular vendor that sells of all his tomatoes at a dollar a bag. I'd say each bag is 2 to 3 pounds. I came home with two huge bags, I've been eating tomatoes every day and even made two jars of sauce to freeze. Two weeks ago when I came home with the half that amount from the Mamaroneck vegetable garden, the roundtrip train fare was fourteen dollars. Not exactly good economics and that doesn't factor in the cost of seeds or plants. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter but what's odd is price does matter at the beginning of the season as I usually refuse to buy the first tomatoes of the season which start off around 4.99 a pound and as high as 5.99 a pound. I guess it's not the price of tomatoes- it's the price of experience. I won't pay a high price to experience the taste of tomatoes early but I will pay an exorbitant one for the experience of eating one I've grown.

+ OGMedia:Tomato Farmer

+ OccasionalOasis:Birds on the Wires

Summer Slips Away

2009-09-02T15:53:00.004-04:00

Two things tell me that the summer is ending in Mamaroneck. The Judge's Hostas bloom almost precisely on August 15 and there's a realization that the long days are numbered. Then the autumn clematis starts to flower. I just about caught the very tail end of the hostas, their scent is exquisite mingled with the phlox, but they had already begun to look a little raggedy. The clematis was a mass of tight buds with a few popped blooms. Where did this summer go? It seemed to start well enough, early even, as I got my gardening on a lot earlier this year, and then in the middle there was that wonderful week in Rhode Island but there seemed to be no momentum. It never seemed to actually take off, and here we are at the end.

+ GreenKraft:Recycled Houses

+ OccasionalOasis:In Search of Wabi Sabi

Bean Harvest

2009-08-31T17:42:00.005-04:00

'We can't eat another bean', Heidi said so the entire harvest was mine to take home. The Purple beans are prolific and its a pretty plant with pretty flowers, it will definitely be re employed next season. The Blue Lake beans, planted a little later are just getting going. I have to get my bean recipes lined up. I did poke around the interwebs to see if there was any way of keeping the purple color from reverting to green and, no, it's not possible unless you keep them raw. This weeks haul also included some tomatoes- a couple of Black Krims, a large head of chinese greens and lots of herbs.

Lush Window

2009-08-28T21:24:00.004-04:00

I wanted to try something different on my front windowsill. I've had an assortment of terracota pots there before. This time I wanted something more lush, like an indoor courtyard in a tropical hotel. So I got deep square patio pots about 18 inches on all sides and I crammed whatever I had into 2 of the 3 pots. The middle one is still empty as I wanted to see what would happen - if the plants given that much more soil would get really big. They have. Both the Chaya and the Pulmoneria have hit the ceiling. The branches of the Chaya are somewhat gangly so I've trained the purpleheart up them. The pulmoneria clambers over the dogwood branches I had in spring.

The window is to my right as I work on the computer most of the day. In the morning, the light is strong, almost too strong, reflecting off my computer screen. So now there is more of a dappled effect. I like it, it's calming. I just have to plant the middle one and do a fancy wooden box cover/wrap around it. The ambition is to paint it black and paint some gold oriental lacqeur looking decorations, but that might take a while.

Frozen Green Tomatoes

2009-08-26T17:20:00.007-04:00

A while ago I came across this Mark Bittman video for smoothies. It was life changing. I figured out what to do with all the extra bananas that inevitably spoil before I can eat them - freeze them. Then I discover - processing one frozen banana in my food processor with half a cup of kefir produced not a smoothie but a sort of soft serve frozen kefir that you eat with a spoon. That base could then be modified with the addition of any kind of frozen berries- raspberries, strawberries. I ate more kefir, bought berries from the market towards the end of the season and froze them. Healthiest, delicious most fun good for you food ever.

So I decide to do a food experiment with the two small green tomatoes I found knocked off the plant the other week. I cut and freeze them. One of my all time favorite sorbets is a lime and basil one that's on the menu of a friend's restaurant in Noho, a visit there always ends up with a glass of sorbet on the house. You can see where I'm going with this right? Some Basil leaves from the windowsill, frozen banana, frozen green tomatoes, kefir and some basil. Whirr. Not bad. Next time I would add lime- it needs a bite. My next green tomato food experiment will be another NYTimes recipes- green tomato marmalade.

+ OGMedia:NYC Urban Farming

+ OccasionalOasis:North Coast

Cool Reds

2009-08-18T10:27:00.003-04:00

The temperatures have soared into the nineties which makes the indoors a cool air conditioned sanctuary. Not a bad thing as, I'm additionally confined indoors with a huge workload. Surprisingly, a color that I normally associate with heat has in fact been a cooling diversion. Ice cold cherries and chilled slices of red and striped beets. I blanked out my usual concerns about local produce to buy two incredibly cheap luscious pounds of cherries in Chinatown. The beets are from the garden. I ate the greens and even used the red liquid they cooked in to tint an old t shirt to right that wrong.

+ OGMedia:Botanic Cottage Project

+ GreenKraft:Build Your own Wormery

Early August Harvest

2009-08-08T20:57:00.007-04:00

I decided to run up to Mamaroneck yesterday. I knew the tomatoes and the cucumber would be unruly and I was worried about the potato plants- they looked a little unwell last time I saw them and I didn't want that to affect anything else. So they were the first thing on list. Ripped them all up except one that looked quite different and healthy. There were a handful of tiny potatoes. I dug up the peas but didn't have time to plant anything else. I came home with a few tomatoes, don't know which kind, but dear god the couple I had were good as were the cucumbers. Purple Beans, huge carrots, quite a few Beets (and their greens), Chinese Greens, and herbs galore. Bliss.

Ashes of Roses

2009-08-06T12:33:00.008-04:00

I've barely been outside, never mind gardening due to work deadlines and my new foster dog who's just settling in- so into the photo archives we go and here's a rose that I've been intrigued by that I've seen in a couple of places, Rosa Glauca. The photos were taken at different times at the NYBG, early on when it was in flower and then more recently when it had these amazing chocolate colored hips.

I've never read the book Ashes of Roses but for some reason the title sticks and when this Rosa Glauca caught my eye, those were the words that popped into my head. Perhaps because the shrub has an eerie gray cast even in bright sunshine, a cold color tone that explains it's recurring description as blue or 'pewter blue'. I think this description fits best for me- purplish gray. In any case, it's complex, as described here: bluish gray in full sun (with shimmering overtones of burgundy and mauve), or with an icing of silvery gray-green in part shade

For me, this shrub is intriguing not because of it's colors in their own own right but what it does with other colors- the hips look so interesting against the variegated grass it was growing next to. In central park, a clematis clambers all over the shrub there and the color combination with a mauve flower is striking. The photos which make it look a little livery don't really capture the real thing and its interesting to see how difficult it is too get a mental image of it from the descriptions in articles and catalogues.

Kitchen Window

2009-08-01T09:56:00.004-04:00

My kitchen window is looking pretty lush and dare I say it, not been assaulted by the local squirrels. I am now cutting a chilli pepper here and there, Mint, Oregano, Thyme and Basil. There's a couple more young chilli plants that have grown from seed from chillis I bought in Chinatown. There's a celery too that I've just been harvesting the young leaves. And that's just half the space utilized as I didn't want to go through the heartbreak of growing more and attracting those durn squirrels. I might extend this in the next week and see if I can't add some salad greens and a few more herbs.

I recently read about the National Trust in the UK starting a vertical vegetable campaign to encourage growing vegetables in window boxes. The logic being that it could represent 600 acres of urban farming land. I have four large windows, maybe I might be hesitant to use the front two that are exposed to traffic fumes but it's interesting to think of the possibilities. I also came across these images of interesting enclosed window gardening spaces. As all the emerging ideas for vertical gardens, green roofs and window farms begin to populate the public conciousness, just imagine what an urban city could look like and what it could mean for apartment dwellers.

July Kitchen Garden

2009-07-28T05:45:00.006-04:00

The July Kitchen garden is poised for it's second act. The purple beans have climbed to the top of its tower and has beautiful knotted purple stems and flowerbuds. There are flowers and little miniature fruit on the cucumbers. The tomatoes are not quite as tall but look healthy and some have fruit. There are tiny little fruits on the chili peppers in Mamaroneck, here on the Harlem windowsill, I actually harvested my first one yesterday.

The best part is that although we now wait for all this to get really going, we had for the first time a pretty decent first act. We had a good amount of snap peas which we had both mange tout and shelled. We have had beet greens, carrots, pacific greens and the Monet's Lettuce is insane. It keeps being cropped as young leaves and just keeps coming back. The arugula, a wild Italian version, is small and keeps bolting but I've found the strong peppery taste a great herb for noodle soups.

The not so good news- the eggplants seems to have stalled, the second batch of beets were badly sown- big gaps, and the potatoes are looking a little dodgy.

+ OccasionalOasis:Solitude

+ GreenKraft:Willow Sculpture

Beach Roses and Milkweed

2009-07-23T13:00:00.005-04:00

My last vacation post is about the local flora that I associate fondly with Rhode Island. Top of the list are the rugosas also referred to as the beach rose. They are everywhere with bright magenta flowers and at this time of year heavy with ripening hips. The old house we used to rent always had milkweed popping up everywhere and seeing it anywhere else always reminds me of them at that house. There's also the beach pea that often grows alongside the beach roses. I also think about the phlox that grew in huge drifts near that old house and the Queen Anne's Lace that is everywhere. Weeds, natives, invasives, escapees, all a powerful part of my memories of this landscape.

+ OccasionalOasis:Sea Sky Ocean

+ OGMedia:New American Farmer

Summer Bonfire

2009-07-22T10:19:00.004-04:00

You can just about see my friends' kid, Liam's outline as he stares enthralled by the flames, as we all were. In fact we all became kids, singing songs, eating S'mores, layering all our fond memories of campfires past onto the fiery spectacle of this outdoor hearth. We sat in chairs, in an ancient circle around the bonfire watching the sparks levitate into the dark. The fireflies in the trees echoed their response. It's not difficult to see the primitive logic of smoke and fire as magical and capable of invoking spirits and communicating with gods but who knew in this modern day its immense power in forging community. My vacation was about a reunion with old friends and making new ones as they brought new family members to the circle. This summer bonfire welded our bonds, its shared memory as powerful as it's crackling flames.

Wild Boundary

2009-07-20T09:18:00.004-04:00

My friend's property in North Stonington has an abundance of amazing features but particularly interesting to me was how the garden space is defined. Timbered fencing drew a rouqh quadrant around the property, keeping their two border collies in and drew your eye well into the distance. It was incredibly peaceful to sit in a rocking chair on the porch and visually roam this huge outdoor space that was further sub divided by two stone walls. The wind chimes added an interesting dimension to this space, I could almost sense the ripples of their chimes fade at the perimeter. The fence also kept the wilderness out. Beyond it, the forest was thick and mature. Coyotes yipped at night and hawks prowled during the day to remind us what lay beyond. I particularly loved how the wilderness was allowed to creep in, in places with huge drifts of wildflowers and ferns blurring that line between the two spaces.

+ OccasionalOasis:Kuroshio Sea

Salt Pond Views

2009-07-16T10:20:00.004-04:00

The salt ponds that are a prominent part of the southern Rhode Island landscape, where I'm on vacation add a certain ethereal quality to the views. There's always a sliver of land beyond the shimmer of water, and it always looks slightly hazy, a blue gray blur in the horizon. Although there are tidy gardens that punctuate this view where we are, it's best enjoyed through the unruly tangle of an unmown lawn.

July Harvest Getaway

2009-07-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

On Sunday we had the kohlrabi curried in coconut milk along with some beet greens for dinner. On Monday I harvested a variety of herbs and greens packed them up and and hopped on the train to Rhode Island where I am on vacation for a week. Hence the basic framing of this photo as I am sans computer. I'll probably be posting more photos to twitter until I return next week.