By Design: Green is the new black
Business Times 13 Mar 08;
ARTHUR SIM meets landscape designer Chang Huaiyan, who wants to grow gardens on walls
A FAMOUS frog once said: 'It's not easy being green.' Which explains why even though we live in the tropics - where more than 90 per cent of the world's plant species can be found - so few of us have green fingers.
OK, the frog may have been talking about his skin colour, but anyone who has ever owned a dying money plant will know his pain.
Not Chang Huaiyan though.
Not satisfied with being able to turn the most barren patches of earth into veritable mini-Edens, Mr Chang, a landscape designer, now wants to grow gardens on walls too.
'We are currently making small steps by studying vertical green systems and growing trees in the air without soil by means of aeroponics,' reveals Mr Chang, founder of landscape consultancy Salad Dressing.
'We believe the current technology advancement will allow for a possibility of understanding bio-buildings - like humans who can survive with an artificial heart, buildings can be half-plant too, like a cyborg,' he explains.
It is difficult to doubt a man with such conviction. And looking at what he has done with his own home and office, it's clear Mr Chang understands both plants and architecture well.
He set up his office and home with some friends after graduating from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a master's in architecture.
And it was in this small house in Telok Kurau that he experimented with landscaping.
'My definition of a garden is a man-made space that reminds one of nature,' says Mr Chang, who was mentored at NUS by celebrity landscape designer Michael White.
Mr Chang's definition of landscaping is certainly open to interpretation, and in the Telok Kurau house, he takes the liberty of including a wooden hut with recycled roof tiles and rough-plastered walls for the sole purpose of forming an idyllic backdrop to other landscape elements in the garden.
'I always believe the garden is not just for plants but for people too,' he adds.
The garden was designed as a procession of 'layers of experience' so there is quite a lot packed into it.
One passes through a timber curtain gate, over meandering stepping stones, across a lily pond and into a courtyard before entering the house.
Along the way, there are plants like the tall sterculia, bismarckia noblilis and the mussaenda aurorae - 'for its generous white blooms that reflect the light of a full moon'.
Mr Chang also dots his garden landscape with works of art as a counterpoint to nature, and because it has a 'catalytic effect on the imagination'.
Perhaps what is more remarkable about the landscaping is how it has been designed with the house such that while there are never really any plants in the house, they are nevertheless always there.
He uses a simple interface: 'I decorated the interiors with objects collected on my travels through the tropics - and these are usually objects that celebrate the tropical landscape.'
In the living room, a small strip of garden is made grander with the addition of yellow bamboo, which also has a subtle architectural quality. Mr Chang cannot bear to leave a surface untouched, so he also inscribed a poem on this section of the garden wall.
The kitchen, which faces a shaded wall is the perfect place for ferns and orchids, while the backyard becomes an outdoor gallery of sorts for his collection of black-hued plants like tacca chantrieri and the simpler black-stemmed yam.
While it may seem that Mr Chang appears to have found his own, 'little piece of Eden', readers will be sad to learn that the house, along with the rest on the street, recently succumbed to en bloc fever.
Mr Chang has since moved to a small apartment, and the plants that could travel (together with a chunk of wall with a mural painted by him) moved to an off-beat, one-storey office on the fringe of the CBD.
Here, in between securing contracts to design the grounds of condominiums like One North, Oasis Garden and Newton Meadows, Mr Chang once again works his green magic, attracting monitor lizards, jungle fowl and snakes to his little oasis, just minutes from Shenton Way.
