Director Nigel Taylor draws on his tenure as Kew curator to help the Singapore Botanic Gardens in its efforts to be listed as a Unesco World Heritage site
Melissa Sim Straits Times 15 Mon 13;
For the last 19 months since taking up his appointment as director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Dr Nigel Taylor has gone from botanist to historian, sieving through old newspaper clippings and annual reports, to piece together its history.
And with good reason. Besides running the 154- year-old gardens, he is also fronting the bid for it to be Singapore's first Unesco World Heritage site.
Thankfully, Dr Taylor, 57, is no greenhorn. He was curator of Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and prepared its submission to Unesco. It was listed as a World Heritage site in 2003.
"That put me in touch with the history of Kew, which I hadn't really understood very well," says Dr Taylor, who had worked at Kew from 1977.
He describes his past experiece as "very useful", especially since Singapore has never made a submission to Unesco before.
The Republic's initial application to Unesco was made in December last year and a formal submission has to be made by Feb 1 next year.
A dossier containing documents and images will have to be submitted to show the Gardens' social and historic value to society. For example, it played an important historical role in the introduction and promotion of plants of economic value to South-east Asia, including the Para rubber tree.
Singapore will also have to spell out how it plans to protect the site.
But even if there had been no push for the Gardens to be classified as a World Heritage site, defined as one with outstanding cultural or natural heritage value, he says he would still have done research on it.
"If you want to understand what you've been placed in charge of, it's really important to understand the history of the place," says the botanist, who graduated from the University of Reading in 1977 and completed his doctorate in 2000, studying the cacti of eastern Brazil.
He is now a walking compendium of facts and anecdotes on the 74ha Singapore Botanic Gardens.
He says that 101 years ago, Swan Lake - the main pond in the Gardens - was drained in search of a crocodile which had attacked a staff member. It was the pet of a British colonel and had escaped from the British barracks opposite the Gardens, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Dempsey Village are located now.
Dr Taylor also knows the ages of nearly all the 34 heritage trees in the Gardens. As the Life! photographer searches for a location for the photo shoot, he says: "We can take a picture with the Kapok, it's 80 years old - my mother-in-law's age."
Getting the 132ha Kew on the list of Unesco World Heritage sites - there are 962 in the world - most definitely gave him a leg up over other applicants when he applied for the job here.
National Parks Board chief executive Poon Hong Yuen says the board was looking for someone who "understands what it takes to run a public garden" and has "scientific heft".
"We looked worldwide and found Nigel," says Mr Poon, who looked at more than 20 candidates.
Dr Taylor says he found out about the job from a senior colleague at Kew, who passed a digital copy of a Straits Times advertisement to him. "I think he intended for me to distribute it to my staff," he says, adding that he sent his CV after seeing it.
He came to Singapore - his first time ever - in January 2011, went through two rounds of interviews and was offered the job on his fourth day here.
His previous trips to Asia included two field trips to Nepal and a trip to Hong Kong, where he was an adviser to Kadoorie Botanic Gardens & Farm.
He says he had achieved a lot at Kew, but he "wanted to go to the next stage" of his career. Making a career switch at the age 56 was not difficult, he adds, for "in Kew, it was a continual battle to find resources to do the things you wanted to do, but it is a lot easier in Singapore".
Kew, he says, is barely 50 per cent government- funded, so the money comes from other sources, including ticket prices and sponsorship from individuals, corporations and foundations.
The Singapore Botanic Gardens has "substantial funding from core government through the National Parks Board and Ministry of National Development, but people are still very keen to support it," he says.
That is not to say that the British do not care for Kew Gardens. "They do, but there are so many other things competing for their interest, whereas, in terms of position in the national league table, Singapore Botanic Gardens is much higher up," he adds.
"I hate to say this because my ex-colleagues at Kew will probably never forgive me, but the standard of maintenance here is fantastic. It's a slightly smaller garden than Kew but it's much better maintained, again partly because of being better resourced."
Kew surpasses Singapore in one aspect: scientific research. "It's a huge scientific institution, Singapore Botanic Gardens' science is on a more modest scale, but that isn't to say it can't grow - it can."
The Gardens, for example, has 650,000 dried specimens in its Herbarium, a library of biodiversity, whereas Kew Gardens has 8 million.
To Dr Taylor, a botanic garden is more than just a "glorified park".
There are laboriously labelled plant collections which are used for research, and preserved plant specimens which are used to understand plant diversity and the economic potential of plants. That sets it apart from a regular park, he says.
"I get quite cross if people call it a park. I have had to tell some very senior colleagues here they are not to call it a park. It's a botanic garden because a botanic garden has a very different function."
When he was curator - or what he calls head gardener - at Kew, he took it upon himself to work half a day a week with the staff.
"I wanted to know how the staff think and whether they had any complaints," he says.
He has brought this practice with him to Singapore and has met each manager and most of the junior staff on a one-on-one basis. He was in charge of about 200 people at Kew and has about 100 staff members here.
But there are cultural differences between working here and in the United Kingdom, he says. In Singapore, he adds, people do not question the decisions he makes, whereas back home, the culture is to question, so he is careful not to present a new idea as something he wants done, but more like an idea to be discussed. "You never realise how much power you have here."
He worked in Kew for 34 years, starting as a horticultural taxonomist. "It was a common assumption that if a plant had a label on it in Kew gardens, it was correctly named," says Dr Taylor, who joined Kew fresh out of university.
"But the reality was not so, the label might be there but the identification of the plant might be wrong," he adds.
So for nearly eight years, his job was to go through the collection of temperate plants that were suspected of not being accurately labelled.
That gave him a broad knowledge of plants which prepared him for his subsequent position as curator of the garden and now director of Singapore Botanic Gardens.
"If you are a scientific specialist in one particular group and then given responsibility for a whole garden, there's a severe risk that you don't understand all those things you've never studied, so you kind of ignore them," he says.
But that does not mean he is content with being a generalist.
Dr Taylor studied cacti for his doctorate degree at the Open University in the United Kingdom. He has also collected and prepared cacti specimens for the Herbarium at Kew, and wrote and co-wrote books on cacti.
His love of cacti, in fact, started when he was seven years old. His mother, an avid gardener, took him to visit a friend who had a collection of cacti in a large greenhouse.
He was given a few plants to take home and he put them on the window sill of his family home in north London.
The spines would often get caught in his mother's net curtains and she "didn't like them very much but she could see it was an interest," he says.
His mother was a nurse and father a cabinet maker. Both are dead. His 53-year-old sister is a chiropodist.
In fact, he was just five years old when he started gardening in a 3 sqm patch in his parents' garden.
His aunts gave him some seeds - poppy, forget- me-nots and snap dragon - and told his mother to give him a plot of land. "So I was given these seeds and I never looked back," he says.
"I was five. And at seven, I got the cactus bug and it's still with me 50 years later."
The cactus bug also led him to his wife, 48-year- old botanist Daniela Zappi.
In 1988, while he was a taxonomist in the Herbarium at Kew, one of his senior colleagues had a big research programme in Brazil and needed someone to study cacti.
Dr Taylor went to Brazila and was introduced to his future wife, who was studying for her master's. "She had the same interest as me and she is a very lovely lady, and I thought, 'This is fantastic, I now can combine my interest in women, with my interest in cacti'."
Ms Zappi, who is on a three-year sabbatical from Kew and is currently working as a senior researcher at Gardens by the Bay, says: "We were very competitive and would see who would be the first to find the cactus in the field.
"I know he was drooling over a new species that I had found," she says, gloating.
The couple got married in 1991 and have two daughters - Vanessa, 17, who is studying at Chatsworth International in Singapore, and Beatrice, 15, who is in a state school in the UK and staying with Dr Taylor's cousin.
He says he has adapted well to Singapore and often goes to hawker centres and the market in Redhill, and takes public transport.
On Sunday morning, he enjoys a breakfast of yong tau foo with laksa gravy at Redhill market.
"When we first started going to Redhill market during the weekend, we were the only angmohs there and everybody look at us. But now, we go so frequently, they are not surprised," he says.
He spends his weekends in the various nature reserves in Singapore and in his own back garden.
He and his family live in a ground-floor unit of a condominium in Tanglin, a far cry from their last home, which was a house on the expansive grounds of Kew Gardens. He also used to garden in a plot of land, also within the Gardens, 100m away from his house.
Despite having a small garden here, he becomes very animated when he starts to talk about it. "It's a bit of a jungle," he confesses, his eyes lighting up with delight.
"I'm waiting for the day when someone in the apartment above us says the view out of their window is obscured by my papaya or by one of my other little trees that are now getting rather large."
He has planted Chinese chestnut, kapok, dwarf starfruit and papaya trees, to name a few.
"I like to collect seeds and grow them and see what they look like as babies," he says, adding that the form and structure of young plants are often different from the adult.
"It's the thing of how puppies and kittens always look cute, I find seedling trees cute," he says, with a geeky grin.
Dr Taylor, who used to take part in vegetable- growing competitions in the UK, says the only thing he misses are the long summer days when he can potter in his garden till 10pm.
"Whatever you do, it still gets dark at quarter past 7pm here," he says.
But that does not stop him from spending time in his garden every day. "I could not live without plants. They are a complete drug for my addiction," he adds.
My Life So Far
“I have done something I thought I would never do. In the world of plant specialities, particularly in gardening, if you’re a cactus specialist, you can never be an orchid specialist, the things are diametrically opposed. The people who grow orchids think the people who grow cacti are inferior; the people who grow cacti think the people who grow orchids are rather snobbish, and so you never get a cactus person growing orchids and vice versa.”
On how he has an equal number of cacti and orchids growing in his garden
“I don’t hang around the expat community. I made a conscious effort in the beginning to get to know Singapore and the people of Singapore, so I travel everywhere by bus. I’m also into living in a sustainable way and public transport is the sustainable way forward, I think.”
On living in Singapore
“When I came here, I knew it was a proper job but I felt like I was going on vacation because I associated vacations with going to the tropics... so I had been here a year, when it occurred to me, ‘you’re not on holiday anymore, this is a job’. That bubble has now burst but that’s not a bad thing because I’m enjoying the job so much.”
On how he is enjoying his work
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