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Singapore

Garden Stories: Hedrick Kwan of Plant Visionz

Hedrick Kwan has a bold, charismatic and vivacious personality, which also translates to his gardening and landscaping style, and contemporary approach to creating food pairings. He runs Plant Visionz, a landscaping business specialising in edibles and orchids, and is a classically trained horticulturist.

Highly experienced, he takes a practical approach to landscaping projects but is also intuitive and open to try new, unexpected combinations, and he has a beautiful flagship project to show for it. Hedrick kindly gave me a tour around Portico, a restaurant off Alexandra Road, where he has grown a mix of edible plants for use by the establishment, such as Hyacinth Beans, Ceylon Spinach, Ulam Raja, Fennel, Sweet Potato Leaves, Limes, and mini Cucumbers.

He has also grown a wonderful medley of herbs, often together in containers with other plants, which is not only a clever space saving idea, but it also works in terms of companion planting, and looks great too. These herbs are used in cocktails also, basil flowers is one such example. Hedrick, who’s profession also includes being a Horticulture Culinarist – one who puts together food concepts and recipes using plants, also teaches cooking classes, and is a curious food forager, on the look out for edible plants off the sidewalks of Singapore.

January 3, 2015 by Olivia

City, Garden Stories

Garden Stories: Suekay of Urban Agriculture

I enjoy my catch-ups with Suekay, sometimes I pop by her Bishan residence to talk about collaborations, where the garden offers a wonderful backdrop to our discussions. She lives with her in-laws, who have created a lush, pretty garden with the help of a gardener. It has quite a neat, unified, formal appearance, with mainly ornamental plants. There are plans to introduce edible plants in the near future, which is exciting to hear. As you’ll see, I couldn’t resist getting a little snap happy on the garden… It’s such a beautiful, relaxing space, I feel like I’m visiting a resort each time I go there.

I’ve known Suekay for a while now and I love her warm personality and down-to-earth approach to everything she does. She’s very driven with her online gardening supplies business, Urban Agriculture, which retails a range of gardening products including seeds, microgreen kits, fertiliser and soil enhancements. We have a working arrangement where I list seeds and worm tea on her website. On top of running Urban Agriculture, she looks after NONG (by Edible Garden City)’s retail operations.

She made a transition from the financial sector to go full-time into promoting urban farming, a profession that she finds a lot more joy and meaning in. Here she shares her motivation on making a career switch, and her journey so far. If you find Suekay familiar, you might have seen her in a previous post on her beekeeper colleague, Thomas Lim.

December 9, 2014 by Olivia

City

Take a look inside Singapore’s only national nursery

On Saturday, NParks (National Parks Board) opened its Pasir Panjang Nursery to the public for the first time, and I went down first thing in the morning with mom in-tow to view their 12 hectare growing space. I loved what I saw.

I especially love its vast expanse of space and plant life, including flowers, vegetables, fruits, ornamentals, trees, and aquatic plants. There were also bees and other pollinating insects flitting about from flower to flower.

The tour seemed to go by quickly, even though it went for an hour and a half. The guide shared lots of interesting details about different plants, and the session was highly interactive, where we got to touch and smell various plants and flowers.

He shared that aquatic plants, including water lilies, sit in this storm water surge canal pictured below, and helps purify water that runs through it. In times of heavy rain, lots of sediment gets washed into the canal.

November 17, 2014 by Olivia

City, Garden Stories

Garden Stories: Donald and Rachael Tan

I had the pleasure of visiting Donald and Rachael Tan’s green haven and corridor farm in Punggol recently, and was bowled over by how space-efficient and creatively laid-out it is. Between the couple, Donald maintains the plants, and Rachael harvests produce for the table.

Even though his corridor gets only two hours of sun each day, he has managed to grow a wide variety of plants. Beyond ornamental plants, he grows microgreens, herbs like purple basil, chocolate mint, thyme, dill, pandan, curry, sawtooth coriander etc, he has fruit plants such as gooseberry, grapes, gac fruit, and vegetables like kang kong, amaranth spinach, curly kale. There are so many different plants that I can’t list them all… in fact, I can’t remember them all!

I got to know Donald better when I caught up with the Edible Gardens team one day for a lunch discussion. We bonded over the subject of Daiso and its small but useful gardening section, and how he, as well as my parents enjoy buying supplies from there to supplement our gardening needs. It was after viewing photos of his green corridor from his phone, that I felt like I had to pop by for a look. The plastic baskets sitting on his verandah are all from Daiso, and he has lined them with geotextile, which provides good drainage while keeping all soil in place when watered.

November 7, 2014 by Olivia

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