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Permaculture in the Tropics

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by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 55 no. 1

Permaculture is a name coined and patented by the Australian visionary Bill Mollison. Mollison alerted Australians to the importance of protecting biodiversity and agricultural land. As well as promoting an organic, interlinked and labour saving agricultural approach, he also encourages gardeners to plant indigenous rather than exotic in order to provide sustenance for birds and wild life. He has been outstandingly successful as an arbiter of what is appropriate in Australia, and has, I think, contributed greatly to the sense Australians have of occupying their particular place.

Thanks to him, people recognize not just a genera of Banksias or Grevilleas, but specific species, and gardeners vie with each other to collect and nurture many varieties. To sustain the interest, he started indigenous nurseries to produce the plants that people wanted in their gardens and thus initiated a whole new trend in gardening. Gardens, by the way, sustain a multi-billion dollar industry around the world.

I was surprised to learn that a permaculture garden has been started in a suburb of KL and was delighted to be reacquainted with the methodology. The objective of the garden in KL is to show terrace house residents that they can grow enough to sustain, or at least significantly supplement, a family with home grown vegetables, fruits and herbs. It is organic in the sense that no pesticides are used and the application of natural fertilizers is minimized, but there are no complicated sequences of crops or treatments to protect the tender plants. The whole system works on common sense and labour saving planning, so I will try to paraphrase the principles without sacrificing too much of the content.

Most important is the soil, which should never be left exposed, but covered instead with a constantly maintained layer of mulch (and this can be anything from grass cuttings to leaves) that will protect it from weed growth, excessive heat and drying out. It will also sustain healthy earthworm and micro-organism populations. The concern that everything should be composted first before applying to the ground should be a bit flexible: better to place what you have on bare soil unprocessed than to tip it out. Obviously some mulches are better than others, sawdust is not as good as fallen leaves, for example, but if sawdust is all you have, then put it on but try mixing different sources of nutrients.

One warning about fungal attacks bears repeating: keep the mulch about 2″ from the stems of plants to protect them from fungal attack, especially in the wet season.

Place your vegetables where they will get the morning sun but not the hot afternoon sun. Apparently plants grow most in the mornings and ‘shut down’ when the heat threatens to overwhelm and dry out of the plant. Protection from the afternoon sun is important, either by a wall or other plants that provide shade.

Plant slow maturing vegetables at the back, faster ones at the front. Enhance this by making path loops into the garden bed so that access can be had to all plants but tramping over beds is minimized, because this can damage the soil structure.

Mix your planting, place individual leafy vegetables in amongst the herbs or tomatoes, don’t group them together where a pest can readily destroy the lot. If you lack planting material to create this mix, scatter pre-soaked kacang hijau about. They will readily sprout and will provide the nitrogen fixing that will be advantageous to the neighbouring plants. Mix the legumes with fruit, leaf and root crops all together.

Compost and liquid manure are supplements that are needed in the tropics because of the heavy rainfall that leaches away nutrients so quickly. Where there is space, and you don’t need much, chickens can also be introduced into the equation. Especially in an orchard, they will control weeds and limit pests, as well as provide fertilzer for the garden. In exchange, you can enjoy an occasional rendang ayam and fresh eggs!

The garden in KL has tried to develop a water retention system involving a pond and a water route for run off to be reused before discharging into the drain. A pond increases the biodiversity of the garden and encourages frogs and toads that are beneficial for a pest free environment. In the pond, this particular garden had tillapia, which did not sit too well with the ethics of Permaculture, as Mollison always stresses the importance of using indigenous animals and plants. As table fish they may be easy to grow but once escaped into our rivers they out compete indigenous fish and ultimately reduce the aquatic biodiversity. I would suggest sepat (gouramys) as they are very hardy, can feed of anything available, including mosquito larvae, they don’t eat the aquatic plants and they can be harvested from time to time.

The garden we visited actually had a ‘grey water’ area, where kitchen water is discharged into a depression in the ground. Kangkong, bananas and ubi could thrive here and make use of the waste water and the nutrients in it. Obviously used cooking oil cannot be disposed of this way, nor can it be added to a compost heap, but a sand filled hole in the garden permits micro-organisms to break it down further.

Creating a sustainable system to produce safe food that utilizes nutrients that would otherwise be lost or wasted has always been my preoccupation, and it is intriguing that you can do it on even the smallest plot. It may require a bit of ingenuity to salvage runoff or to save rain water, but I think this is the ultimate challenge for a gardener: creating something that is worth more from your effort and ingenuity than it was before, and to see the benefits to other creatures, plant and animal. Keeping in touch with these natural processes and learning how to manipulate them for our advantage without harming other things is a great achievement, and it is so rewarding to eat your own kangkong or cucumber that you have nurtured through the hazards of pests and floods.

The word permaculture is a combination of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. The objective is to create a mixed garden of fast and slow maturing plants that will gradually develop into a forest garden. Taller trees will bear fruit and provide nesting sites for birds that will help maintain the balance, and protect the more tender plants below. The immaculately laid out KL garden is designed to minimize labour input, and once established it will be a joy, but gardens will always need a degree of personal care and observation. By checking on plants regularly, you get to understand what they are likely to need, and the challenge is to transform these needs and our own into a compatible garden that supports us and wildlife on a sustainable basis.

Wong Perng Fey

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Wong Perng Fey

PerngFey2

Malaysian painter Wong Perng Fey was one of the Malaysian artists of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2002.

Bio

Born in Kuala Lumpur in 1974, Wong Perng Fey is an artist who has built his reputation as an experimental and versatile painter since his graduation from the Malaysian Institute of Art under the school’s scholarship in 1998. His works are in many prominent public collections such as the National Visual Arts Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Bank Negara Malaysia Museum Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and Galeri Petronas, Kuala Lumpur. He lives and works in Beijing.

Exhibition Opening Speech

by Angela Hijjas

Solo Exhibition
2 – 19 October 2002
Valentine Willie Fine Art, Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur

Thank you all for coming this evening to see these new landscapes by Wong Perng Fey.

I would like to thank Beverly and Valentine Willie Fine Art not just for inviting me to open this show today but for having being such strong supporters of our artists’ residency programme. This gallery has suggested to us a stream of fine young artists to support, one of whom is Perng Fey, and it has provided Hijjas and I with our greatest pleasure in seeing their works develop up to this exciting exhibition stage.

Like most of us, I am neither art critic nor scholar, but I come to the new work of any artist with formed ideas about what the world is like, and inevitable expectations about how it might be portrayed. I also have a particular affinity with landscape as it illustrates to me the way we relate to the environment around us, but as in most areas where we have a little knowledge and think we know what is going on, in fact we may not.

Perng Fey’s depiction of landscapes definitely overturns any preconceived ideas of what we are likely to see. These are not pretty kampongs or rivers winding through romantic hills and forests: these landscapes portray what happens to nature and land when they are modified by man. Landscapes are not static, they change, which in itself confronts our expectations of variations caused by mere weather and light. Today, unfortunately, landscapes have been destroyed and desecrated, but it is something we rarely confront, not wanting to question the very real benefits that development has brought us.

Landscapes have shaped every culture, including Malaysia’s for generations, and yet we ignore their plight in our flurry of progress. At the same time, many of us are influenced by the cultural values of more temperate climates where open spaces are commended as ‘vistas’ and exotic gardens are the epitome of beauty. We occupy this place, but we do not know it as well as we should.

From my personal perspective Perng Fey is painting the landscapes that people would rather ignore: the ravaged and the marginal. These are the landscapes that are the closest to us but are the most neglected. Perng Fey’s are the landscapes from our peripheral vision that we really do not recognize as our own, but which are in fact our prevailing visual experience.

Despite this dark side of the work, his skills of composition and handling of his medium seduce one into looking and seeing beauty, but they are simultaneously disturbing.

PerngFey1Another area of Perng Fey’s interest lies in the remains of settlements, most of them tacked together as temporary shelters that have served out their usefulness and have since been abandoned. Like his landscapes, they are devoid of people, as if he is charting our passage across the land, tracing the trail of our transience. They are however, quite beautiful, forcing us to review something that has always been seen as a blight on the
landscape, once again transforming our usual perspective.

These paintings bring the conflicts of occupying a place to the surface: they are compelling canvases portraying something that I did not initially recognise for what they are, they are puzzling and yet beautiful, and I can assure you that a longer acquaintance with these works will not disappoint.

I have been watching Perng Fey’s works develop over the last 9 months and am intrigued by these landscapes that he is understandably reluctant to verbalise. At first viewing each piece seems simple enough, but as the series has developed so has his subject. Just the other day, we were discussing how, by seeing all his work hung together like this, we can experience the development of his ideas as body of work. Even those of us who are fortunate enough to acquire one of them might want to return to this brief opportunity to see the whole collection, because it works so well as a changing viewpoint of landscape and our human habitation.

I congratulate Perng Fey for this remarkable show, and thank you all for coming this evening. Enjoy the exhibition.

Jean Weiner

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Jean Weiner

Visual artist Jean Weiner was the Australian resident artist in the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2002.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
Jules-Henri Poincaré

Jean_at_work

Jean Weiner’s bold, organic, painted surfaces play on the ambiguity between abstraction and realism, and between art and science. The works are abstract, yet are also re-presentations of physical reality. They are a fusion of art and entomology: an in-depth look at colours and patterns of butterflies, moths and beetles, enlarged so that they impact upon the senses.

The artist’s aim is to encourage the audience to become aware of their physical, intuitive and emotional responses to colour and pattern. To encourage this embodied meditation between a composition and its audience, the artist employs a wet-on-wet technique of blending oil colours through the use of a variety of fine brushes in order to produce his signature-style blurred borders and smooth finishes. This technique arrests focused vision, invoking a momentary feeling of chaos, but ultimately invites a new sense of ‘alive calm’.

Jean Weiner is particularly versed in his subject, bringing together in an interdisciplinary approach: a Master of Art in painting; a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, for which he received first class honours; and his work as the honorary curator of foreign lepidoptera (butterflies) at the Australian Museum. Like the new theories in science and philosophy, the artist’s practice demonstrates the interconnectedness of both natural and cultural life. His works especially resonate with Chaos Theory’s ‘Butterfly Effect’. This environmental notion of the beating of an insect’s wing in one hemisphere having, through a web of events, possible catastrophic outcomes in another, becomes in the artist’s work a statement of hope, a way of exploring new ways of being. Just as the natural world is interrelated, so are cultures: as an Australian of Czech and French origin who has lived and practised in Sydney, Asia and Europe and exhibited internationally, he lives and celebrates this (bio)diversity.

Ultimately, Jean’s art is about wonder; it reminds us that the world, even in its smallest detail, is extraordinary.

Jean’s work has received growing recognition and acclaim through university conferences, judged and curated exhibitions, government and philanthropic grants, artist residencies and public collections. His paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Kuala Lumpur. Recently he was selected by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia to participate in the Alami II Science/ Art conference at Mt. Kinabalu as part of UNESCO’s international year of the mountain. The artist’s upcoming exhibition will show the work – based specifically on Malaysian butterfly, moth and beetle species – that he has produced during his year-long artist residency at Rimbun Dahan.

Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces…
Mallarmé

Ahmad Shukri Mohamed

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Ahmad Shukri Mohamed
Work by Ahmad Shukri at the Singapore Contemporary Arts Fair, 2002.
Work by Ahmad Shukri at the Singapore Contemporary Arts Fair, 2002.

Ahmad Shukri’s work for the Rimbun Dahan residency is as profuse and multi-layered as a tropical garden. The artist will exhibit paintings, installations and a large drawing on canvas, all in his highly decorative and richly referential style.

Shukri_eggsOut of the explosion of work in his studio he identifies four major series. Two installations of ‘incubators’, structures filled with hundreds of white and black plaster eggs, draw on the yin-yang concept to suggest the inevitably heterogeneous nature of the world. As Shukri puts it, within a hundred white eggs there will be a black egg, and vice versa.

The ‘people’s forum’ (sidang rakyat) installation consists of multiple pairs of boxing gloves cast in plaster and set atop a low table covered in a patchwork of textiles. For Shukri, the boxing gloves represent the sparring of politicians, while the textiles are the backdrop of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable situations against which their competitions take place.

A series of diskettes embedded in perspex sheets and overlaid with resin and silk-screen printing point to the irresistible spread of technology, which he sees as again neither wholly good nor bad but always composite. In the voyager series of paintings nature and culture morph into each other: the blades of a ceiling fan echo the petals of a flower and a chicken appears both as a living animal and as a child’s plastic toy. Whereas the installations illustrate socio-political conditions as Shukri sees them, he describes the paintings—featuring paper boats and planes, dragonflies, butterflies, cartoon characters, scrawled scraps of text—as diaries, eclectic personal records of memory and experience.

Many of the motifs—the eggs, the chickens, the fabrics representative of Malaysia’s main ethnic groups, the diskettes—are familiar from Shukri’s previous work, but for the artist the significance of these images is inexhaustible and ever elusive. A thread running through Shukri’s work in this exhibition is precisely this multivalent eloquence of objects: a loosely sketched rabbit in one painting alludes to the rabbit-breeding business started by a friend of the artist, whereas the origami rabbit appearing in the same work is suggestive of Japan’s influence on Malaysia.

An interest in texture and textiles and the play of surfaces also underlies Shukri’s work. His canvases are layered with squares of fabric or cut-out numbers, reflecting, he says, the multi-layered nature of the world. Several of the paintings feature scraps of fabric machine-embroidered with bands of thread in subtle gradations of colour. The use of techniques such as these, from outside the strictly traditional artist’s repertoire, as well as the incorporation of images of found objects like coconut husks and flowers, spring from Shukri’s belief that art is embedded in everyday life. The everyday world revealed in Shukri’s work is one of vibrant, chaotic and constantly changing multiplicity.

 

Tending the Garden

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by Angela Hijjas

Recently the Selangor Branch showed the new three hour BBC series by David Attenborough called ‘State of the Planet’, and I have been mulling over it ever since. The main issue he explores is the impact of humans on the global landscape of plants and animals and he demonstrates quite conclusively that the process of impoverishment of species is unrelenting once mankind arrives on the scene.

Islands provide the most easily read examples of what happens after the arrival of man. Hawaii was first settled some centuries ago and the impact on biodiversity has reduced the number of species by a half and counting, to the extent that there is little remaining of the original habitat, hence the application of the term ‘impoverishment’.

Easter Island experienced the same process in a more dramatic form. The people who occupied the islands made boats from forest wood that enabled them to fish, but eventually with the growing success of the human population there were fewer and fewer trees for boat building until all were gone. Diets changed without these boats, demonstrated by archaeological middens. Fish were no longer a source of protein, nor did the people have any way to leave the islands. Eventually they all died and left their plaintive monuments of huge stone faces staring out over the ocean, perhaps as a prayer for rescue from their devastated island.

The famous biologist Edward Wilson was interviewed extensively in the series, and summarised man’s impact as not intentionally destructive, but that we ‘succeeded too well’. Hand in hand with a technological revolution that enables us to extract the vast majority of the world’s resources for our own consumption means devastation for forests and oceans. As our numbers increase with greater security of food supplies so our impact explodes.

To continue like this can only mean the destruction of our habitat, just as on the Easter Islands.

We may think of our own immediate habitat as being relatively intact, but with globalization our foot print is actually widespread; Japan provides an interesting example. For decades the Japanese have not cut their own forests, believing that they enshrine an irreplaceable essence of Japanese culture. But rather than using other materials instead of wood, they buy their timber from lower cost countries where the environmental or cultural impact is not added to the cost of extraction. But in the long term, if we degrade the habitat of other countries, we degrade our own.

But how long is the long term? How long will it be before we feel the impact of our over extraction of resources? I think within this decade we will see significant changes in the Malaysian lifestyle. Already we eat less seafood, not because we lack the boats, but because we have over ‘harvested’ most of our tropical fishing grounds and the international market takes the best of what remains. We will no longer be able to afford wood for construction, so our housing and interiors will be unrelenting concrete. Our sources of water will be severely polluted by the destruction of forest cover, clean water will be a rarity, and tap water will be undrinkable (in fact many already refuse to drink it). Most power will not come from renewable sources in the foreseeable future, and until it does we continue to live off our capital. In fact, our whole present lifestyle is ‘off our capital’, and until we reverse that the future does not look bright.

Sustainable development is something that banks and governments do not consider enough in their cost-benefit analyses, but by ignoring the people who have to make a living from the small things and concentrating only on those who make on the big things, the balance will invariably be upset.

As the biologists know, it is the small things that make the big things work.

The global threat of the disenfranchised poor, eking out marginal lives in desert lands like Afghanistan, is not going to go away as more and more areas become biologically impoverished and can no longer support the life they did before.

On a positive side, there are some relatively painless things we can do to moderate the problem. First and foremost, we must introduce population control of our own species. The days of successive horizons of economic growth are gone. Even Malaysia which is blessed with a small population (by Asian standards) needs to take immediate steps to control population growth to a level where economic growth is not a prerequisite to provide jobs for everyone. We need to determine what population our land can support on a sustainable basis and make that our target.

The belief that God will provide for however many children there are is patently untrue, as God did not provide for the Afghanis. If the war doesn’t kill them, the drought will. However, God did provide a garden, which should have been enough for all but now the garden itself is in danger of being destroyed. We submit to the will of God in the inevitable, but we are obliged to look after ourselves when it is not inevitable and not to depend on miracles. Providing jobs for all our children out of nothing would indeed be a miracle.

Second we must revitalize our rural areas where once productive land has been abused and neglected. Restore its usefulness and reinvigorate the rural traditions that nurture land rather than neglect it.

Third, we must protect as inviolate our natural assets, the forests and seas.

The tragedy of September 11th may well mark a new age in world politics, but it has certainly brought into focus the power that humankind has acquired. The wealth of the developed world expressed as the military strength massing in the Gulf compared with a devastated Afghanistan is an obscene example of what is wrong with humankind’s success. Somehow we miss the whole picture, as we strive for self fulfillment we fail to understand that our habitat is now global. There are no more hiding places for us than there are for Osama bin Laden, the fate of humanity rests with the management of our global habitat, and this requires an enormous will to realign priorities.

Possibly democracy and human rights are no longer the principal goals for humanity. As America will have to cope with restrictions on its freedoms in order to curb terrorism, so we all may find that we have to do without a great deal of what we take for granted if humanity (and the biodiversity that supports us) is to continue.

The best we can hope for is that the wealthy of the world realise they have a moral obligation to ensure the development of the poor, to clean up environmental damage and to restore our habitat to what can support humanity and the rest of global biodiversity.

Otherwise Attenborough’s view of impoverishment will develop to its logical conclusion: we will destroy our habitat and ourselves, and the final scenes will be uglier than anything you have seen on CNN.

Lau Siew Mei

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Lau Siew Mei migrated from Singapore to Australia in 1994. She undertook an Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2001. Her first novel Playing Madame Mao was published in 2000 after the manuscript was shortlisted in the inaugural Queensland Premiers Literary Awards for the Best Emerging Queensland Author. Her short stories have been broadcast on the BBC World Service and published in literary journals in Australia, USA, Canada and the UK. During her residency in Malaysia, she researched Peranakan culture for her new novel. She also appeared at the Singapore Writers Festival, and gave a reading at Badan Warisan.

Gardening in the Forest

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Gardening in the Forest
The early morning view from the jetty at Endau Rompin. The garden had to relate to this landscape.

by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 4, 2001.

To lay out a garden in the world’s oldest tropical rainforest is an exciting and daunting prospect. The Nature and Education Research Centre at Endau Rompin was opened in March by the Chief Minister of Johor, and the new facilities required some planting to set them off to their best.

Built by the Orang Asli of Kampong Peta, the centre is a haven far from city life and occupies a transitional space leading into the forest. The site for the Centre was chosen because it was long since cleared of the original forest by the Orang Asli for an orchard. The continuity of landscapes is important, so it was an important objective to at least keep the sense of this space being part of their culture. One of the hard decisions had fortunately been made by the Parks Director Encik Basir who had previously ordered that the vegetation between the Centre and the river be cleared. It was a good decision that forms the Centre’s sense of place by revealing the river.

As the building was finished some time ago, there was already some regeneration on site that gave clues about appropriate planting choices. The decision to restrict the range to plants from the park was an obvious one, and the Orang Asli had collected several species of gingers, melastomas, ferns, bananas and palms that were just waiting to be laid out.

We visited Kampong Peta to see what the Orang Asli planted around their homes, and found that the villagers had brought in many decorative species, pokok kampung, as distinct from pokok hutan. The yellow flowering Alamanda is popular, and things like Clerodendron, which I had always thought a forest species, but if it is, it is not from Endau, as the villagers were definite that it did not grow in their forest.

In the penghulu’s compound the white Melastoma takes pride of place. It is a rare find in the forest, but is now occasionally available from nurseries. Rarity, though, creates value and my idea to plant a whole bank of them seemed a bit excessive!

One of the prettiest plants is the peacock blue fern-like Selaginella wildenovii. It flourishes in the surrounding forest and had naturally established itself in the shade under the edges of the buildings. I decided to follow kampong practice and clear everything else well away from the structures, as maintenance of wooden buildings is a lot easier if they are not overhung or undermined by plants. The Selaginella is not invasive, and seems to cope with the dryer soil under the buildings, so planting more will create a blue field under the structures.

A feature that I wanted to highlight is the river rock walls of the main pavilion’s building platform. Rather than planting along the base that would conceal the rocks, we opted to plant the common pink Melastoma malabathricum densely along the top of the wall, outside the roof’s drip line and in full sun. When established they will display a mass of colour, and by highlighting this commonest roadside plant visitors will appreciate the potential of local plants in landscaping.

At the higher end of the same bank we planted Curculigo latifolia, where a few self sown individuals were thriving. Their pleated palm-like leaves are an interesting feature, and I wanted them massed together as densely as possible. The Orang Asli use this plant as a sweetener: the fruits are eaten and the residual sweetness flavours the next taste of something less palatable.

The rare white Melastoma was planted just opposite the pink variety, in full sun and wet soil beside the excavated pond to help conceal the damage done by digging. The plant likes full sun and a wet position, so it should do well and create a highlight.

An existing landscape plan nominated unspecified palms for the space between the pond and the dormitory. I considered transplanting five seedlings of the Livistona endauensis to line up with the building pillars. These palms are restricted to a sandstone ridge overlooking the centre and were first identified as a new species during the Malaysian Nature Society’s expedition into Endau Rompin in the ’80s. The Orang Asli didn’t think this was a problem, although sometimes palms are difficult to transplant and I wasn’t sure about removing these unique site-specific plants. In the end a more readily obtained Caryota or fish tail palm was substituted.

Another decision that related to the nature of space had to consider the large open area cleared of secondary forest and adjacent to the river view clearing. I considered a selection of indigenous trees, like Tristania that grows along the river banks upstream that would eventually be tall enough not to block the view, but decided against it. Not only would they need more shelter than the site provides, but it meant leap frogging the immediate past landscape of the Orang Asli dusun, a sense of which I wanted to preserve. There is lots of forest around but I wanted the landscape to acknowledge that this clearing and the forest have been in the care of the Orang Asli for centuries.

Several huge durian trees and a forest rambutan remain, the rambutan totally unlike the stunted bud grafted versions we see today. I suggested that the Orang Asli collect specimens of forest fruit trees, unusual things that they would relish, to plant in the space. Their immediate interest showed that it was the right choice. These trees will take years to fruit but they will form a major landscape feature and educational asset.

And there lies the difference between naturalist gardening and landscaping. Landscaping in the urban sense is about an instant transformation from one view to another, asserting the transition from one ownership to another, whereas gardening with a historical and natural perspective continues the landscape in a modified form where one makes do with what one has and improves upon it. The relentless search for novelty and fashion, not just in our clothes and home décor, but in the print we make on the land, means that we are removing ourselves further from our natural home, further from our natural landscape.

A Gardener’s Review

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A Gardener’s Review
A variety of Eugenia, showing white flowers. A common belief among naturalists is that white flowers attract moths, yellow ones attract butterflies, and red ones appeal to birds.

by Angela Hijjas

From The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 3, 2001.

I was a rank beginner when I started writing on landscaping with indigenous species. Since then my interests have broadened, and my garden has become an obsession, but why did I choose indigenous, and how far am I in achieving my goals?

The common stem fig is rarely seen ripe: as soon as it is edible it is plucked by bats.

My broad ideas were initially inspired by gardens in Australia, where there has been a growing interest in Australian plants over the last three decades. There, gardeners use local plants to create a specific sense of place, to conserve water and nutrients and to encourage native birds and animals. This same sense of place is special to me here in Malaysia, because I want my garden to reflect the fact that I am here and not in Australia, nor just in some unspecified tropical country. The garden had to assert the whole history of the place and the plants that were on the site for thousands of years before it was cleared for a coffee plantation just 70 years ago.

As well, the conservation of water and nutrients presented a challenge. An organic approach seemed the most appropriate, so we set up systems to compost and mulch, and selected hardy species that can naturally withstand insect attack or drought. As in the Australian example, this choice of local species simultaneously created an instant pallet of colour and form that is particularly Malaysian.

Here there is no drought as in Australia, but everything is relative. Deplete the soil of organic matter, expose it to the tropical sun and soon the situation will resemble drought or flood. With nothing to retain moisture and nutrients, plants have to cope with extreme conditions that flatten all but the hardiest. The instant gardener would intervene chemically to help his plants: fertilize, pesticide, herbicide and fungicide. A sure step to suicide…. for the planet, if not for the gardener. Far better, surely, to choose a wider species mix and conservative gardening techniques to create a naturalist’s garden.

In my previous garden in Kuala Lumpur, a neighbour prided herself on her roses, beautiful tall bushes that produced an amazing crop of flowers considering our location just 3 degrees from the equator, but to me the price was unacceptable as several times a week the unmistakable smell of agrocide came floating over the fence.

At that stage, I had a small garden that was low maintenance, of hardy species that screened us from the neighbours. It just required an occasional pruning, and apart from the aesthetic value of looking at green rather than street, I didn’t really think about it much. When we decided to move to our 14 acre dusun, or village orchard, the garden became a major element that had to be taken more seriously.

I wanted shade most of all, and was inspired by the arboretum at FRIM, where the massive dipterocarps soar a hundred feet overhead. Planting fruit trees was not a priority as there were already plenty, and although I had a brief fling with ‘cash crops’, like sweet corn, the returns did not justify the effort. The nice thing about trees is that once they are established they need little attention.

Once the dipterocarps were on the way, I needed bulk underneath to give form and volume to the planting, so then began the hunt for local ferns, gingers, palms and ground covers.

Searching around the nurseries in Sungai Buloh and everywhere I traveled in Malaysia became an opportunity to find new and unusual plants that had some relevance to a regional garden. My most recent find is the mauve seeds of the fish tail palm Caryota rumphiana from Gua Gomantong in Sabah. I had never seen them in fruit although this magnificent solitary palm has become common in KL planted by the roadside.

The search for plants has sharpened my awareness of species in the forest, and I was delighted to recognize, also in Sabah, the beautiful palm Arenga undulatifolia, growing on the limestone outcrops along the Kinabatangan River. I have tried to germinate seeds of this rare species that I collected from the Singapore Botanic Gardens, but failed. Now at least I know its natural growing conditions so can try again to replicate the alkaline, well drained habitat.

While many bananas are considered inedible by humans, they make excellent food for wildlife: insects visit the flowers, and birds, mammals and bats take the fruit. This Musa sp. called pisang belali gajah in Malay provides hundreds of fruits that ripen progressively over months, providing a stable food supply.

An important continuing project is the herb garden, which is more a spice garden with lots of ethno-botanically relevant plants: toddy palms, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, meninjau, pandan, chillies, vanilla orchids, lemon grass, pepper, turmuric and tamarind, as well as local medicinal plants. Organic vegetables make the garden useful, while the fragrant blooms of gingers and creepers provide the atmosphere of the ‘exotic East’ which is actually the here and now, not the remote and romantic.

We started Taman Sari by taking a leaf from the Chinese vegetable gardeners’ practice. We burned the clay left over from the house excavations, and if one can talk of a transforming experience, verging on the religious, this was it. Creating a garden is all about making something beautiful and productive that wasn’t there before. Burning clay, the worst kind of soil one could be blessed with, transforms it into a soil that is porous, retains and releases water slowly, that crumbles easily and is sterile and ‘sweet’, blessed as it is with charcoal fragments from the burning. Transubstantiating fire converted my gardening into a religion: to do everything as naturally as possible.

As I became more aware of birds in the garden and the processes of establishing plants, I realised how rewarding it is to share my space with other creatures. I am delighted to say that in the last month I have seen in my garden a pangolin, a two-meter keeled rat snake, chestnut bellied malkohas, crested serpent eagles getting their daily lift from the hot spot on our plaza, a blue winged pitta, large biawaks, a pair of hill mynas calling from the fruiting kenanga trees, and millions of iridescent flies attracting masses of swifts as the flies fed on a flowering Terminalia bellirica. I look forward to the spectacled leaf monkeys feeding on the Terminalia fruit in a few months time.
Not all is resounding success, though. Despite my mix of species I have recently had a plague of white ulat bulu, hairy caterpillars, that have completely defoliated several of these Terminalias. Without spraying, I just have to pray for some natural predator to arrive, but am none the less anxious about the monkeys’ food supplies. They must find enough forage elsewhere in the kampong, where trees are being cut every day to make way for more houses.

I experience a real sense of urgency about wildlife, not unlike worrying about one’s children, so I continue to plant as many species as I can to supplement available food sources. So rather than farming for people, which was the original objective of our dusun, I am now gardening for wildlife, and the animals make the seasons of my garden just as much as the plants do. When we have come full circle, I hope my garden will resemble the forest that was here for thousands of years before it was thoughtlessly replaced by a mono-cultural farm that was destined to fail.

I have one relic of that pre-agricultural era, a worn stump that has eluded all attempts to remove it, and it silently reminds me every time I pass of my mission.

Conservation for Children

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Conservation for Children

by Angela Hijjas

Now that my children are adults, I look back on my record of creating awareness about conservation issues with them and realise that communicating knowledge about our environment is not necessarily automatic just because the parent is concerned. I generated one child as actively involved, joining me bird watching and botanizing, while the other is more intellectually engaged rather than practically. I have realized that the key to creating involvement and intelligence is creative play, and you need to start as young as possible.

Play in Malaysia is denigrated as a shameful activity for children. As parents complain about their children’s playfulness, equated with being ‘naughty’, they refuse to validate the activity with encouragement. Children learn pretty soon that it doesn’t please parents. Malaysian parents are less likely to get involved and engaged with their children’s activities, and this is the really shameful part. Children learn through play, and they learn more if parents reinforce what they learn by participating.

Now if you think here is some Mat Salleh who doesn’t understand the value of discipline and hard work, my credentials are impeccable, thanks to two very clever daughters, both graduates of Harvard, one a Rhodes scholar and writer, and the other an anthropologist-naturalist studying choreography.

Looking back on those first essential years together with my daughters, I suppose I taught them things that interested me. Look at the birds! See that flower! Teaching them to read the landscape around them for signs of other natural occupants of the spaces we inhabit made our afternoon walks and travelling all the more interesting for us all and encouraged them to feel part of the wider environment. But we also played with water, mud, sand, looked for shells, examined rubbish washed up to the shore. There was lots of fossicking and plenty of time for them to wander freely around and discover things for themselves.

I was surprised recently when a three-year old expressed delight at sitting in a car with the windows open and the breeze blowing in her face: she had never experienced that before! It’s something that we take for granted that everyone knows about movement and wind, but this child had never travelled anywhere without airconditioning. Children need to experience all aspects of their environment to begin to understand that they have a place in it and basic play activities out in the open are crucial to children understanding about the world and how it works. Otherwise they are in danger of seeing everything insulated and separated from them, through the window of a car, or on the screen of a television.

The most important tools must be sand and water. I am yet to meet a child who tires of playing with shovels and buckets, digging, smashing, filling, draining, creating battlements and fantasies, but at the same time learning about how water flows, how it is impeded, scavenging for shells and seaweed for decoration, and seeking new things to play with.

A little direction on activities provides them with insight into the whys and wherefores, and a favorite of mine is to demonstrate centrifugal force. What child would think you can stop water from flowing downhill? I score points every time with that one, merely by swinging a bucket around in a circle and not spilling a drop! It’s called centrifugal force, tell them, give them the right name, and they will remember better than you do. If they can remember the names of dinosaurs, they can remember any word or information that you give them. This is the time to build vocabulary and language skills, with poetry, rhymes and repeated story telling. I don’t believe children should be spoken to as anything other than small people, patronising and limited ‘baby talk’ is an absolute non starter.

Look for shells together, provide them with a shell book that illustrates all the different families (Periplus has recently issued one about Malaysian shells that is not difficult and illustrates and names all the important families). A segmented box where the collection can be stored and pored over could be the beginning of a lifetime interest. My young visitors are delighted to be allowed to pore over my daughter’s collection and discuss what they have, where they found it and (mainly) if she will part with it! Far more interesting than single faceted Pokemon, but if that is all they have access to, then single faceted the children shall be!

Afternoon walks were always a great opportunity to look under the most obvious rocks and probe inside likely looking puddles, finding where the tadpoles lived, finding the imprint of raindrops on clay pans which we took home to start our own natural history museum of fossils. We checked daily on all the local animals, watched the bats darting to catch swarming flying ants after the rain as they poured out in spiraling columns towards the street lights. We named the Erithrina indica the ‘restaurant tree’, because the sun birds regularly probed for nectar and we could watch them from our balcony. We checked the house for toads, especially the lower floor, and respected their right to occupy the guest room as they in fact did us a service by keeping the insect population down… a simple lesson in ecology that required guests to be a little tolerant!

When we traveled we visited museums and exhibitions everywhere. The Natural History Museum in London is a favorite still especially when it has interactive displays on things like the decay of an organism, in our case a rabbit, with graphic photographs of rot and maggots, concluding with the exclamation (after initial distaste) of ‘let’s recycle another bunny!’ The daily drive to school usually presented some form of roadkill that we could check in passing as to its state of decay…. such is life in Malaysia, you won’t see it in a museum but you will see it on your daily rounds! Museums here commemorate human accomplishments rather than celebrate the glory of the world around us, so we need to go round with our eyes open for interesting creatures and processes, stop and look, discuss and read.

One self indulgence that I always splurged on was children’s books. I bought everything as there was no library for us to use, but do be selective. Don’t go for the mass circulation Enid Blyton type of book, look for clever illustrations, something that will intrigue and encourage children to be curious, avoid books with simple drawings of daisies as the only garden flower. Children need visual stimulation as well as information, they need a reason to look at a book again, on their own after you have read it to them because visually there is something more to discover, even if they can’t read. Reading to children can never be overdone. I read on demand for a decade. Admittedly I didn’t do much else, so thank god for domestic helpers!

And here lies the kernel of truth that is hardest to accept in Malaysia: there is no one else who can bring up your children as well as you would do, and you can’t expect an illiterate Indonesian maid to fill the role of parenthood. Those early years are so critical, I wouldn’t have missed them for anything and they paid such handsome dividends. Both always did well in (local) school until forms 3 and 5, although had trouble accepting the rote learning, but they became Malaysians in the process and that I wouldn’t have had them miss.

Give it some thought, and see if you can spend more creative time with your children or grandchildren. It is truly life’s most rewarding experience.

Margot Wiburd

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency ,
Margot Wiburd

Margot was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2001.

Biography

Margot_bowls
Breathing Space, 250cm x 99.5cm, pastel on paper, 2002.

Australian artist Margot Wiburd began her creative career as an advertising copywriter, followed by work as a producer’s assistant with ABC Television in Melbourne. After extensive language studies in Germany and Spain she returned to advertising for five years, working with Saatchi & Saatchi Compton in Madrid.

After a nine year absence, Margot returned to Australia to study art, graduating from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1989. Since graduation, steady development in painting has been complemented by a stimulating ten years assisting feature film director, Paul Cox, in a variety of roles, including a writing collaboration. During this period Margot was awarded a short tuition scholarship at the Academy of Realist Art in Seattle and was accepted into the Ecole Albert de Fois in France to study classical oil painting techniques for six months and a further three months the following year. A masterclass in portraiture followed with Jacob Collins in New York.

In 1998 a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada resulted in her first solo exhibition. Later that year, at the conclusion of work on a major feature film in Hawaii, Margot lived for a month in a beach shack on the outskirts of the remote settlement of Kalaupapa (a former leper colony) on the island of Molokai. The isolation, tranquility and overwhelming spirituality of her surrounds resulted in the first of her multi-panelled works combining figurative and abstract elements to create the mood of a particular place and time.

Several group shows and a further solo exhibition in Melbourne reveal a consolidation of the main features of her work: an exploration of space, calm and simplicity.

During her residency at Rimbun Dahan, Margot worked both in pastel on paper and oil on canvas, inspired by the abundance of natural resources at her disposal at Rimbun Dahan, by her travels within Malaysia, by the jade bracelets she so admires, and from still life. She considers the Rimbun Dahan residency to be one of the finest opportunities available world wide through which an artist can focus, take risks, grow and give themselves heart and soul to their work in an atmosphere of complete support and kindness, with the added interest of immersion into a challenging new culture.

Works by Margot Wiburd hanging in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan.
Works by Margot Wiburd hanging in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan.

‘Breathing Space’

The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi suggests that greatness exists in the inconspicuous, the minor, the hidden and the ephemeral. Pared down to the essentials, the beauty of things modest and humble can gain strength through understatement, creating a reverberation on a sensory level. Kandinsky spoke of the choice of that object corresponding to a vibration in the human soul. “As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so like-wise does every object represented.”

The French poet, Francois Ponge, writes: “A shell is a small thing, but I can exaggerate its size by putting it back where I found it on an expanse of sand. What I’ll do is to take a fistful of sand and observe the little that’s left in my hand after almost all of it has run through the interstices between my fingers; I’ll observe a few grains, then each grain, and not one of these grains will still seem a small thing; soon the form of the shell, this oyster shell or this razor clam, will impress me as an enormous monument, colossal and yet exquisite. Mysterious.”

I have attempted through my drawings and paintings to capture that intangible sense of something greater than ourselves that one can find in nature or in a carefully crafted object. I hope to engage the viewer’s intuitive love of beauty, letting his or her mind wander into the painted image, soak up the quiet space, go inward and beyond.

In Australia I draw sustenance from the ocean’s infinite horizon. When you sit by the sea, the clarity and expansiveness of the image can trigger haunting memories, dreams, emotions.

Here in Malaysia, as the lush surrounds of Rimbun Dahan’s fertile garden jostled for attention, my work became preoccupied with isolating elements from their prolific, competitive environment, separating them from the mass of sensory input, giving them space to breathe and convey a sense of their uniqueness. In a quest for peace, beauty and space, I found myself continually eliminating elements, reducing the images to a state of unencumbered simplicity.