By Sheila Stanley
Thursday April 1, 2010
KUALA LUMPUR: A tropical Malaysia-themed garden is set to bloom at the Chelsea Flower Show in London this May.
The 220-sq metre garden, designed by award-winning botanical design firm Amphibian Designs, is inspired by lush rainforest and traditional Malaysian village garden plants.
The main person behind all this is 28-year-old ethnobotanist James Wong, an up-and-coming television star in Britain, who co-founded Amphibian Designs with partner David Cubero.
"We’d like to pair traditional Malaysian materials like sustainable coconut wood and white limestone with native species like pitcher plants," he said while on a recent trip to Malaysia to film the BBC2 documentary special James Wong’s Malaysian Garden.
While in the country, Wong took the opportunity to scout around for local plants that would survive the more temperate English climate.
Floral pursuit: Wong posing with the Rose grape (medinilla magnifica) plant at the YG Park nursery in Cameron Highlands recently.
One of the places he visited was Cameron Highlands, where in YG Park nursery he came across the Rose grape (medinilla magnifica) plant and the elephant ear taro (alocasia macrorrhizos).
He also shopped for some cultural items to be included in the garden.
"I picked up a tepak sirih while in Kuching – I think it’ll lend a unique feel to the garden," he said.
Intended as a showcase to highlight Malaysian flora and natural habitats, the Malaysian garden in Chelsea is part of Tourism Malaysia’s ongoing promotion to sell Malaysian parks and gardens abroad.
Born to a Sarawakian-Chinese father and an English mother, Wong studied primarily in Singapore and moved to Britain for his university years.
He studied business in the beginning but realised his life’s passion was plants and decided to do ethnobotany.
He completed his MSc in Ethnobotany at the University of Bath and trained at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
His research resulted in him living in Ecuador for 18 months, learning how the Ecuadorians use their plants and picking up Spanish.
Wong ventured into television not because of the glamour but because he thought it would be the best way for him to do ethnobotany without spending the next seven years of his life "working towards a PhD in a remote part of the world and studying a subject that only the professors that marked my paper would ever read".
Wong has an infectious passion for plants and people, which doesn’t stop when the cameras stop rolling.
The Malaysian garden at the Chelsea Flower Show will be opened by Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen.
For an update on the garden, visit http://mygarden.rhs.org.uk/members/James-Wong.aspx
-- The Star
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