CHINA:Gardeners across the Far East are taking up trowels and pruning shears and digging for an environmental revolution, writes Clifford Coonanin Singapore and Beijing
Asia's green-fingered enthusiasts are leading a revolution that sets out to combat CO2 emissions, provide a bit of colour and bring the scent of flowers into people's lives. While most apartments don't have enough room to swing a watering can, and the tough pace of life makes it difficult to find time to cultivate even a little window box, gardening is booming in Asia's high-rises.
Whether it's huge state-sponsored tree-planting programmes in China or small roof-top gardens or balcony bonsais in Hong Kong and Singapore, gardeners across Asia are taking up their trowels and their pruning shears, getting on their knees and digging for an environmental revolution.
Governments are slowly waking up to the fact that gardeners can be good for the city. Plants cut air and noise pollution, they reduce ambient air temperatures through evapo-transpiration and their leaves block the heat of the sun.
Singapore is known as the Garden City, and the tropical city state is a lush place with beautiful vegetation, rightfully famous for its orchids and fruit. However, dizzying growth means a shortage of gardens, largely because four-fifths of Singapore's 4.5 million people live in high-rise tower blocks.
Wilson Wong (28) started the Green Culture website in September 2004, which provides information for local horticulturists relevant to the local climate and lifestyle.
"I started Green Culture Singapore because there weren't really any avenues that Singaporeans could turn to answer their gardening questions, solve their problems or get them inspired. Although Singapore has been known as a garden city for a long time, there has been no active gardening scene on a national level. We didn't even have a gardening magazine.
"I hope the discussion forum can serve as a convenient platform for gardeners to ask questions, exchange tips, provide insights for each other. By harnessing the power of the internet, gardeners can now log on at any time and any place.
"As a young person myself, I hope that I can get to know and/or inspire peers of the same age to be interested in gardening."
He said the older generation likes to grow "useful" plants, such as vegetables, spices and medicinal herbs, including spring onions, laksa plant, hot chilli, fragrant pandan, tumeric, ginger, lemongrass and curry.
The Chinese like to grow "lucky" plants, including "red" showy flowers such as the Desert Rose. They avoid white flowers because white is the colour associated with death. The website forum has attracted more than 1,500 high-rise gardeners in Singapore and, last year, Wong started and led a community garden near his home.
In May, Singapore unveiled Treelodge@Punggol, its first "green" housing estate. Plants growing on the walls keep the 712 apartments inside the seven 16-storey tower blocks of the development nice and cool.
On top is an eco-deck, a large garden with a jogging track and exercise stations for seniors. The development is the biggest green residential project in Singapore to date.
Wong's goal was to "bring gardening to the masses" - a message similar to the one in mainland China.
If small moves to bring about environmental change in Asia, such as gardening, are to have any effect, then it has to be a success in China.
A Chinese garden was traditionally a peaceful place of contemplation, where feng shui was carefully observed and people took time to smell the flowers. But these days the traditional Chinese garden survives principally in the names given to the huge housing developments or plush villas springing up all over the cities and suburbs as part of China's relentless urbanisation programme - River Gardens, Beijing Legend Garden or King Garden Villa.
However, people are increasingly getting out onto their roofs, and soil-less culture has been rapidly developed during the last 15 years in mainland China. People mostly grow vegetables, but increasingly they are using their balconies to grow flowers and small trees.
Beijing has pledged to add 100,000sq m of roof gardens every year from 2007-2010.
For many years flowers were considered a bourgeois obsession, but horticultural shows are all the rage in China these days, and cities compete for who can stage the most spectacular.
Gardening takes on huge proportions in China - the country has five million garden workers. In April, Chinese president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao joined two million people in Beijing for voluntary tree-planting outside the city.
"Forestation is a matter that concerns the immediate interests of the people. Every citizen should assume his responsibility and actively participate in planting trees," Mr Hu told the volunteers. The government is keen to plant more trees ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing next year to ensure that trees can do their bit to break down pollution and stop dust from the nearby Gobi desert from choking the dry city.
In 1981, the government ordained that all Chinese citizens aged 11-55 were required to plant three to five trees every year. Last year, about 550 million Chinese planted 2.16 billion trees in China. This month, China is launching the Green Long March, which will wend its way across China to underline China's commitment to environmental sustainability.
More than 10,000 students and environmental activists will march along 10 routes across China, teaching "green" practice and planting trees.
Hong Kong exemplifies the rise of the tower block in Asia, which saw the green-covered mountainsides of the island and the relatively undeveloped parts of Kowloon give way in the 1950s and 1960s to low-rise, then high-rise, residences. Gardening became something the elite on Victoria Peak did on weekends, but was not an option for the poor workers of Mong Kok.
In Hong Kong, a surgeon called Arthur van Langenberg has become the poet laureate and brave champion of urban gardening, part of his quest to show that living in Hong Kong, home to some of the most densely populated areas on Earth, does not mean abandoning any connection to nature.
A Hong Kong native, he was surprised to discover there was no manual on how to garden in this still-green former colony, so in 1983 he published Urban Gardening for Hong Kong. In 2005 he published a follow-up, Urban Gardening: A Hong Kong Gardener's Journal. These days, Dr van Langenberg has avocado, papaya and lemon trees growing in the concrete yard of his apartment near the city centre.
His works look at some of the challenges of urban gardening in a high-rise environment. Some of his avowed enemies include birds, dogs, cats and sceptical neighbours.