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Green Thoughts: Greening your garden
Green Thoughts: Greening your garden
Not all colour in your garden comes from flowers or fruit. After all, few flowers bloom all year round, and fruits are highly seasonal. Nor is foliage limited to conventional leaves: it can come in the form of casuarina needles – or distinctive succulent shapes that do not resemble leaves at all. Nonetheless, leafy plants are central to your tropic garden, the more so since evergreen foliage retains its hues all year round. Not just green either, but silver, bronze, red, purple, and of course, variegated.
Green Thoughts: The beauty of floaters with an accent
Green Thoughts: The beauty of floaters with an accent
If the lotus and water lily are likely to be main players in your Thai water-garden, there are others which can perform useful cameo roles. One such performer is the Egyptian papyrus (cyperus papyrus). Every schoolboy knows one fact about this plant: it was used to make the first paper. The second ‘fact’ is not common knowledge – namely that the ‘bulrushes’ in which the infant Moses was hidden, were almost certainly papyrus reeds.
Green Thoughts: Lilies – A Rainbow Nation
Green Thoughts: Lilies – A Rainbow Nation
To expats, the water lily is a familiar and reassuring presence; indeed, there must be few goldfish ponds in Europe or America without a complement of nympheas. If that means they lack the sheer exoticism of the Asian-based lotus, they do possess the advantage of coming in a spectacular range of colours. That characteristic alone makes the water lily among the most popular of all cultivated plants.
Green Thoughts: Walking on Water – Lotuses and Lilies
Green Thoughts: Walking on Water – Lotuses and Lilies
Thailand has a high annual rainfall and Phuket is no exception to this, as anyone who has experienced the summer monsoon can testify. This year has been especially watery with precipitation likely to exceed 100 inches. But despite this abundance, Thais have a special reverence for water and its vital role in life. Expats drenched during  the April water festival of  songkran  quickly  realise that one of the impulses behind this celebration is to cleanse and renew, to herald the onset of the new rains that will bring life to the parched earth.
Green Thoughts: Let your personality grow
Green Thoughts: Let your personality grow
It is a truism that your garden is an expression, an extension of self. In a very literal sense, this is blindingly obvious: you are the person responsible for its design, its maintenance, and for the plants you decide to put in it. When I was an undergraduate, the Professor of Biology, an acknowledged authority on things botanical, spoke on a weekly BBC program called “Gardener’s Question Time”. But in fact his own garden was a neglected wilderness of weeds. Once, when the “Beeb” wanted to interview him in his own space, he did a deal with his neighbour, the Philosophy Professor, who happened to have a splendid garden. So, in all ignorance, they conducted the outside broadcast in the wrong place. No doubt they said very flattering things about his flowers and shrubs.
Green Thoughts: Sprouting sun worshippers
Green Thoughts: Sprouting sun worshippers
As readers familiar with this column will be aware, I often iterate the point, perhaps ad nauseam, that botanical names are worth mastering, since they offer valuable clues to a plant’s characteristics: maybe its place of origin (Japonica), its physical features (odorata), or even its cultural requirements. 
Green Thoughts: Is your garden full of beans?
Green Thoughts: Is your garden full of beans?
The very first time an expat ventures into a local Thai establishment for lunch, s/he will probably find a plate of green veggies on the table. We are not talking posh restaurants here, but the kind of open roadside eateries frequented by Thai workers, where the food is presented for your inspection in large metal pots. The platters of greens? Usually a mix of morning glory and cashew tree leaves, maybe some Chinese kale or chives, perhaps okra. Certainly, beans. A gamut of exotic flavours.
Green Thoughts: Good vibrations and your garden
Green Thoughts: Good vibrations and your garden
“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…” While we are all confined to barracks, or, more pleasurably, to our own home in the tropics, the privation has, ironically, opened up a wonderful opportunity for us – the chance to appreciate our gardens anew. Beyond their walls, Mother Nature is herself enjoying a welcome respite from man’s incessant predations: less pollution, less plastic, less  pandemonium, fewer people. More opportunity for the planet’s besieged and threatened creatures to get their breath, maybe their lives back. But the garden is unique: a natural location where man’s presence is not only necessary, but invariably positive. A symbiotic arrangement. Not only is the gardener good for the garden, the garden is good for the gardener. Have you ever encountered an unhappy tiller of the soil? Not often, I would guess. From the time when mentally disturbed Egyptian royalty were prescribed soothing walks in palace parks, to the use of therapeutic gardening to assist World War One soldiers with nerves frayed by gunfire and mud, there has been a proven nexus between such “green” activities and improved physical and mental rates of recovery – including reduced stress, a keener sense of well-being, even increased self-esteem. In his 17th century poem “The Garden”,  Andrew Marvell famously described such immersion as trance-like: “annihilating all that’s made/ To a green thought in a green shade.” In fact, the natural world has long been lauded by writers able to empathise with its ‘good vibrations’. Thus the Romantic poet William Wordsworth writing more than two centuries ago: One impulse from a vernal woodShall teach us more of man,Of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can. An extravagant claim. However, what he means is something all nature lovers and, one hopes, all gardeners believe in, the restorative and benevolent force of nature. In what is more a Buddhist than Christian “impulse”, the poet avers that walking in a wood where spring is springing is an enspiriting experience, a place where we feel a sense of kinship with other living things, in harmony with the universe. While few of us today nowadays enjoy such a bucolic existence, every gardener can testify to the therapeutic power of Mother Nature. If we cannot walk among the bluebells in a “vernal wood”, or marvel at a tropic lake ablaze with lotus blooms, where better to experience the presence of nature than in our own garden; smelling the earth after a freshening shower, inhaling the perfume from a jasmine flower , or listening to a chorus of cicadas. Personally, I experience another more mundane benefit – a sense of optimism and satisfaction at the very  thought of all that springing, magical growth that is silently happening beyond the house walls – buds opening, roots delving, leaving unfurling, seeds sprouting, flowers bursting into bloom. Come a new day, I venture out into a kaleidoscopic world, a living tapestry where everything has subtly changed. There is growing evidence [no pun intended] that gardening helps in other, measurable ways. In an increasingly urbanized world , the presence of plants, particularly trees and shrubs in our own borders or in nearby parks and communal gardens, enriches the very air we breathe. All photosynthesizing  plants act as a sink for potentially harmful carbon dioxide, sequestering the greenhouse gas, and releasing life-enhancing oxygen into the atmosphere. Just for the record, they also intercept harmful airborne particulates, save water through their roots and leaves, and prevent flooding. One study recently found that green plants prevented nearly a million cases of respiratory disease, and removed in one year an estimated 17 tons of atmospheric pollutants. Six leafy trees provides enough oxygen for one person. Who knows, they could be an unseen ally in the fight against Covid 19… And the nearer these plants are to human habitation, the greater their health-giving impact on people’s lives. Trees in your garden? An especial treasure. Nor are we the only beneficiaries  Shrubs and leafy trees provide cover and nesting areas for birds; your lily pond is home to frogs and fishes; the nectar of flowers is life-sustaining for butterflies and bees. In material terms, gardens increase property values and help pay the grocery bill. If you have a garden in Thailand, there is little excuse for not growing your own produce since most of the world’s edible fruits and vegetables thrive in this most fecund of environments. Your local market demonstrates what local growers can do. Are you doing likewise? The garden is a microcosm of the world at large – the natural world. Today, its ecological importance has never been greater- and is getting more and more so. As green spaces vanish everywhere, as habitats for wild creatures shrink and as man is increasingly confined to an unnatural existence in apartment or condominium , our gardens and even our pot-lined patios fulfill a crucial role – oases of greenery in our concrete jungles. Tend and nurture your garden, In so doing, you will be nurturing yourself. Patrick’s book ‘The Tropic Gardener’, the culmination of 13 years of writing about tropical plants and their cultivation in Phuket, is now available. Promotional price of B900, including post and packing. Dr Patrick Campbell can be contacted at his home Camelot, located at 59/84 Soi Saiyuan 13; Rawai; Phuket 83130. Tel:66 076613227 (land line), 0655012326 or 0857827551 (mobile).
Green Thoughts: ‘The Tropic Gardener’
Green Thoughts: ‘The Tropic Gardener’
My book, The Tropic Gardener, has just come off the printer’s press. As readers of this column and of earlier pieces in the Phuket Gazette and elsewhere will be aware, I have been writing about tropical plants and their cultivation for some 13 years. This book derives in part from those reflections; it is the culmination both of my own attempts to create a garden in Southeast Asia, and in so doing to offer a written hands-on guide to available plants and their cultivation.
Green Thoughts: Flowers of fortune and good luck
Green Thoughts: Flowers of fortune and good luck
Valentine’s Day is upon us and the shops are awash with cards displaying gold hearts and red roses. Ever since Robert Burns wrote: “My love is like a red red rose / That’s newly sprung in June” and likely long before that, the rose has been every lover’s choice for February the fourteenth, a floral symbol not just of beauty and romance, but a metaphor for the well-spring of true love, the human heart.
Green Thoughts Water, Water, Everywhere: The hydrophyte guide to lotus and water lily cultivation and care Part 1
Green Thoughts Water, Water, Everywhere: The hydrophyte guide to lotus and water lily cultivation and care Part 1
Most of Thailand has a high annual rainfall and Phuket is no exception to this, as anyone who lives here through the summer monsoon can testify. But like all natives of hot countries, Thais have a special reverence for water and its vital role in life. Expats have only to experience the April water festival of Songkran to realise that one of the impulses behind this celebration is to cleanse and renew, to herald the onset of the new rains that will bring life to the parched earth.
Green Thoughts: Practical palms
Green Thoughts: Practical palms
In many countries, palms are grown not for their aesthetic charms, but because they produce edible fruit in the most unpromising conditions. While they have been important throughout recorded history, especially in hot, arid regions, nowadays they are assuming even greater commercial importance as cash crops.
Green Thoughts: Small and mighty palms
Green Thoughts: Small and mighty palms
While many arecaceae are notable for their impres­sive height, characterised by a solitary, unbranched stem surmounted by a crown of fronds, and often producing massive seeds – the coco de mer has seed pods weighing up to 30 kilograms – oth­er palms are neat and shrub-like, often denizens of the understory and able to survive with limited access to sunlight. In fact, their diversity is highest in tropical rainforests.
Green Thoughts: Grand palms
Green Thoughts: Grand palms
When I was a boy, I had to endure long waits on sooty railway stations – yes, it was the age of steam – whose walls were plastered with posters of seaside resorts with azure seas, white sands, bronzed maid­ens and swaying palm trees.
Green Thoughts: Spiky fellows
Green Thoughts: Spiky fellows
A number of foliage plants are characterised by long, narrow, usually stiff leaves which are serrated and/or spiky. In landscaping, these are employed as architectural or ac­cent plants, placed in locations where their distinctive shapes and sword-shaped leaves add an exotic element to the appearance of the natural environment.
Green Thoughts: More ornamental shrubs well worth cultivating
Green Thoughts: More ornamental shrubs well worth cultivating
This month opens the ‘last chance saloon’ door to a few more multi-coloured foliage shrubs. Two or three are consistent performers and might rightly feel miffed if not given a mention.
Green Thoughts: Good vibrations and your garden
Green Thoughts: Good vibrations and your garden
Have you ever encountered an unhappy gar­dener? Not often, I would guess. Gardening is a positive, enriching and even therapeu­tic activity. The Journal of Mental Health, researching the effects – of all things – of allotment gardening, found significantly improved feelings of wellbeing in most of the 136 participants.
Green Thoughts: Ornamental foliage plants, an all-year display
Green Thoughts: Ornamental foliage plants, an all-year display
As I have observed before, most shrubs and herbaceous plants in Thailand are more or less evergreen. And since they have to stand up to extreme conditions, their leaves need to be tough and adaptable.
Green Thoughts: Four bizarre trees
Green Thoughts: Four bizarre trees
You don’t expect to find trees with bizarre la­bels such as the “pong-pong”, sausage or can­nonball tree, but all these species, alive and well here in Phuket, are so named on account of their strange fruit.
Green Thoughts: Tools of the Gardening Trade
Green Thoughts: Tools of the Gardening Trade
Gardening has always been a time-honoured craft, and the tools of the craft reflect that patience in practice. Nowadays, we may have motorised lawn mowers, shredders, trimmers, cultivators and blowers, even chainsaws, but the basic imple­ments are much as they have always been, dependent less on petrol than on perseverance.