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Thoughts on water gardens

Sunday 19 January 2025 02:00 PM

All Asians prize water in their gardens – from the humble pot in the front yard, with its mandatory water lily and darting swordtails, to the fibreglass fish pond, usually painted blue and with a row of pebbles embedded in its rim. If you are lucky, you may have a natural pond or ‘klong’ within the bounds of your property. Unarguably, water adds another dimension, both as an eye-catching feature, and because it allows the cultivation of plants that would otherwise be off-bounds.

Green Thoughts: Rain, Rain... The ordeal by water

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 10 November 2024 02:00 PM

There are various ditties about rain. Those I remember from my childhood include: ‘Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day’, ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain’ ‒ a line from Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ ‒ and ‘When it rains, it pours’. The last quote is particularly apposite. Not that we need any reminding. The stuff has been remorseless this year. Phuket is on course to record one of its wettest years ever,

Green Thoughts: Branching out in your garden

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 3 November 2024 02:00 PM

From time to time I have remarked on the problems, nay perils, of cultivating trees in your tropical garden. The topic merits another look.

Green Thoughts: A trio of virtuous vines

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 6 October 2024 02:00 PM

Vines have to come up the hard way. In Thailand’s tropical, broad-leaved jungles, they start at the bottom, denizens of the understory, but fight their sinewy way to the forest canopy, where they can enjoy the sunlight. A key component of these verdant ecosystems, vines or more accurately, lianas, use trees as a means of vertical support, often employing tendrils or twining mechanisms to attach their woody stems to a reluctant host.

Green Thoughts: A postcard from Bluebell Wood

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 8 September 2024 02:00 PM

Worlds apart. Today I am, as they say, in the other side of the globe – roused from my jet-lagged slumber by the familiar sounds of a tropical garden ‒ the booming bassoon of the coucal, the angry scritch of a lone tokay gecko, the flutings of a magpie robin, the cooing of collared doves. Shafts of sunlight are lasering into my bedroom.

Green Thoughts: Enjoying deep purple in your garden

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 7 July 2024 02:00 PM

Everyone knows about aubergines. You know, those large glossy purple things that look for all the world as though they have been coated with clear varnish. Thailand, however, has many other varieties, all of them edible and all capable of being cultivated without fuss in your kitchen garden.

Green Thoughts: Horses for courses

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 9 June 2024 02:30 PM

Horses for courses? As true of flowers as of fillies. When enthusiastic gardeners who have lived in Europe or North America set up home in Phuket, they must take on board the very different requirements that plants need in this tropical environment.

Green Thoughts: A troupe of oddballs

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 5 May 2024 02:00 PM

Twice recently friends have excitedly described an encounter with a tree they had never seen before. An understandable response. After all, the cannonball [couroupita guianensis] in full flower is a truly spectacular sight. A denizen of dense jungles with large elliptical leaves up to twenty inches long shed twice a year,the tree has arrived in Thailand relatively recently from Central America.

Green Thoughts: Bees in my bonnet

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 7 April 2024 02:00 PM

As the years come and go, my garden is undergoing a metamorphosis. It is ageing more gracefully than its owner: its earlier character as a garden of herbaceous borders, small shrubs and annuals replaced by what is fast becoming a riotous jungle ‒ a sort of Rousseau-esque ‘retour à l’état de nature’ where flowering shrubs have become trees and vines have crept and clambered everywhere.

Green Thoughts: Turning over a new leaf

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 3 March 2024 02:00 PM

As anyone who lives here can testify, green leaves are as crucial to Thai cuisine as lettuce is to a Western salad or mint to English roast lamb. Among the most widely used are coriander leaves: the herb grows more readily in Thailand than in the temperate climes of Europe where the crushed, dried seeds are commoner ingredients in recipes.

Green Thoughts: The root of the matter

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 4 February 2024 02:00 PM

After my previous article on spicy additions to your garden, where should I carry on? Well I’m going to start at the vegetative source ‒ with bulbs and roots – and leave the leaves till last. The most powerfully pungent bulbs in Southeast Asia, as in most corners of the globe, belong to the lily (liliaceae) family. And of these ‒ onions, shallots, chives and garlic ‒ the last named (allium sativum) is the most widely used.

Green Thoughts: The Spice of Life

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 14 January 2024 02:00 PM

I recently went searching for spice seeds. I needed them for pictures that could accompany my updated scribblings about herbs and spices, and also for some experimental cultivation in containers. I found more than I had bargained for, including such exotic stuff as dried butterfly pea flowers (clitoria ternatea), liquorice root, star anise and fenugreek. Not the everyday flavourings I am writing about today. But the foray reinforced my oft-stated belief that there is no end to the cornucopia of flavours we are lucky enough to savour in Thailand. Now acknowledged as one of the great cuisines of the world, it owes much of its status to the amazingly varied produce of the Kingdom.

The Annual Report: Easy on the eye, easy on the pocket

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 24 December 2023 02:00 PM

All gardeners have heard of annuals, biennials and perennials: If pressed, they will tell you that annuals are plants that bloom only once, and will need to be re-planted or re-sown the following year. Biennials, on the other hand, generally flower the year after they have been installed and then give up the ghost, while perennials, in the right conditions, will come back year after year.

‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 12 November 2023 11:00 AM

Tennyson observed in his 1855 poem ‘Maud’ that ‘the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey’. The wood is part of a Victorian garden but the poet might just as well have been talking about your flower beds in Phuket.

Green Thoughts: Bad guys in your garden

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 22 October 2023 11:00 AM

Insects are everywhere. One million different species is probably an underestimate. And while most arthropoda are in decline, victims of pesticides and loss of habitat, your average gardener in Phuket will attest that these critters still lurk everywhere in his carefully tended flower beds and vegetable plots.

Taking a tour of the green

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 6 August 2023 02:00 PM

Last year, I visited friends near Kalasin. Deep in the heart of Isan. Driving north past interminable paddy fields was a dispiriting experience. Barely ‒ and the adverb conveys a literal truth ‒ a tree in sight. Tight-fisted husbandry had meant their remorseless eradication, either because they siphoned up too much precious water, or because the space was needed for the main subsistence crop: rice.

More palms for your garden

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 16 July 2023 02:00 PM

In our last foray into the subject of palms, I referred to the coconut and its more elegant cousin, the foxtail palm or wodyetia. Like other species such as royal, Bismarck, date and oil palms, they all possess a single trunk crowned with massive fronds. It’s how the layman thinks of palms.

Palm ornamentals for every occasion

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 4 June 2023 11:00 AM

When I was a boy, I had to endure long waits on sooty railway stations – yes, it was the age of steam – whose grimy walls were plastered with posters of sun-drenched resorts with azure seas, white sands, bronzed maidens and swaying palm trees. In austerity Britain, no beach in the UK looked remotely like that: it was years later that I glimpsed my first grove of bona-fide palms as I drove a rickety ‘banger’ across southern Spain.

Growing goodies in the garden

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 30 April 2023 11:00 AM

In Thailand one is spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing edible plants to grow. If you can be bothered to count the number of different fruits and vegetables in any fresh market in Phuket, you will find at least 50 different species on display. And nearly all of them are cultivated in Thailand.

Contrasting Favourites: Heliconia and Hibiscus

Phuket Life / Environment

Sunday 26 March 2023 02:00 PM

Following our previous article on ‘Sun Gods and Sun Worshippers’, despite the name, the heliconia’s connection with the sun is less obvious than that of the sunflower.

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