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Swan song from a giant
Swan song from a giant
Friends, now within touching distance of my 90th milestone, I have taken the decision, after careful consideration, to stop writing for The Phuket News. Thanks are due to all of you out there who have taken the trouble to peruse my columns over the years, and especially to those readers who have actively shared their love of our magical natural world. Reaching out to a sympathetic audience has been a privilege, a learning process, and a journey that I have savoured every step of the way. I have made a lot of life-long friends.
Thoughts on water gardens
Thoughts on water gardens
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
Green Thoughts: Rain, Rain... The ordeal by water
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
Green Thoughts: Branching out in your garden
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
Green Thoughts: A trio of virtuous vines
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.
Mixed Emotions: A Thai ’Burning’
Mixed Emotions: A Thai ’Burning’
Back from the Southern province of Trang, and what Thais call a ’burning’. A prosaic epithet for what is a momentous event, impressive in its time-honoured rituals, but to an outsider – a curiosity among 200 mourners – sometimes sounding an incongruous note. A farming community dependent on rubber, defiantly putting on a show that it cannot afford, paying homage to Buddhist monks, who depart laden with gifts ranging from electric fans to cloth and cash.
Green Thoughts: A postcard from Bluebell Wood
Green Thoughts: A postcard from Bluebell Wood
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.
Perfumed Petal Power: A Whiter Shade of Pale
Perfumed Petal Power: A Whiter Shade of Pale
White has so many associations ‒ positively, it is associated with innocence and purity; on the distaff side, with coldness and sterility. In Thailand, the white lotus flower symbolises spiritual perfection for the Buddhist community, and judged by the presence of white in floral garlands, the colour is associated with both friendship and good fortune. Most lucky leis contain two or three white flowers – buds of jasmine and milkweed (calotropis) plus a pair of creamy magnolias for good measure.
Green Thoughts: Enjoying deep purple in your garden
Green Thoughts: Enjoying deep purple in your garden
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
Green Thoughts: Horses for courses
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
Green Thoughts: A troupe of oddballs
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
Green Thoughts: Bees in my bonnet
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
Green Thoughts: Turning over a new leaf
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
Green Thoughts: The root of the matter
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.
And the winner is… Wine
And the winner is… Wine
In a long-awaited move, Thailand’s Move Forward Party is proposing swingeing reductions to the taxes ‒ and there are many ‒ on imported wine. Such measures fly in the face of official thinking which has for decades argued, dinosaur-like, in the following terms: 1) Thais do not drink wine – it is a ‘farang’ tipple; 2) the imported stuff is ridiculously expensive; 3) its consumption has a deleterious impact on the nation’s health; and 4) foreign wine competes directly with Thailand’s fledgling wine industry. OK? So let’s tax it heavily. At the very least, it thereby provides a hefty source of revenue for the nation’s coffers. Billions of baht every year.
Green Thoughts: The Spice of Life
Green Thoughts: The Spice of Life
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
The Annual Report: Easy on the eye, easy on the pocket
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’
‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’
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
Green Thoughts: Bad guys in your garden
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.
Plants entering joint ventures
Plants entering joint ventures
Plants are generally better than humans at being good neighbours. Not always, as we shall see, but most of the time. Much of this cooperation goes on unseen and below ground, Examples include so-called ‘mother trees’ that protect the delicate root systems of saplings from invaders, or transfer water from a relatively wet environment to drier inland areas by holding moisture in their roots in a kind of water-borne relay.