Back to the tropics -Part 1 of 5: Where it all started...and why you need gingers in your life
- milestoh22
- Jan 31, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Feb 1, 2022
Bird of Paradise Heliconia Rostrata - a pretty relative of gingers
A rare visit to Malaysia over New Year (13hr flight with short stop in Doha on Qatar, then a strict quarantine week) afforded me an opportunity to show you where many of our amazing houseplants actually live and thrive in the humid tropics, some growing into spectacular specimens. If nothing else, I hope to not just help you understand the conditions we need to replicate in our homes for them to flourish, but also to inspire you with the myriad choices and sizes of these plants in their natural habitat. I think visiting any plant nursery in the tropics is for planties like us akin to winning a Golden ticket to the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory. Even my sister & brother-in-law who are not normally plant-mad were bewitched by them and couldn’t resist acquiring a few. The age of the intrepid Victorian plant collector may well be over, but we can still share a frisson of their excitement when we find new plants in exotic nurseries or even better, when we come upon them in the wild.
A good example of the latter is in the picture below of TT5: the last tin dredge in Malaysia - it is now a museum to an age when tin mining fortunes were made in Perak and well worth a visit. https://www.facebook.com/TT5PERAK/
Now for the eagle-eyed amongst you, can you spot an Asplenium nidus (Bird's Nest Fern) native to tropical south-east Asia? It is right at the end of the waste chute of the dredge and seems to live on nothing but air and rainwater, demonstrating well its epiphytic nature (There is an air-plant next to it too). In our garden here, they can be grow to large sizes over 1m across and thrives best in dappled shade.
I am writing this blog sat in the air-well (a common feature of tropical homes allowing natural light and plants right into the centre of the home) surrounded by houseplants in their natural habitat. The red packets (ang-pows) were put up by my brother-in-law John for Chinese New Year 2022 (Year of the Tiger).
This is the perfect place to explain where our passion for plants comes from. For this, I need to look no further than the lush garden of the home I grew up in, overseen by my mother, her gardener and our housekeeper Bibit (who is amazing with plants). In our previous home in Kampar, I remember long rows of orchids with sprays so large I could hide under them from the mid-day sun. There were bougainvillea scrambling up pillars, fences and walls, and fruit trees laden with rambutan, mangoes and guava, the latter by the way, a brilliant climbing tree. I grew vegetables as a child and have loved plants since. Many of the houseplants featured in this blog are outdoor plants I remember from my childhood.
I used to fish at every opportunity at a river near our home with my neighbourhood mate, Ah Lek (recreating our very own Huckleberry Finn adventures) and we were surrounded by flora that you would call exotic, but for us, just provided needed shelter from the rain and hot sun. Last night, eating in our local Japanese fusion restaurant, New York Sushi (https://www.facebook.com/NewYorkSushiAndCafe/) reminded me how the love of fishing for tropical fish in the wild made me love nature before it was trendy to do so. Eddie, the owner of New York Sushi, keeps colourful tanks of tropical fish like the one below. I seriously envy his sand waterfall!
But I digress, maybe we will do a separate blog on fish but back to plants. I mentioned fruits and vegetables as our gardens are much more than ornamental in the tropics. Some plants need to work to deserve their place in our gardens and this has stayed with us to this day. But this is not to say these plants are not ornamental in themselves.
So here in our garden, we have banana, papaya, mango, lime, and a rather unusual fruit my mum likes called the Wax Apple or Jambu (Syzygium samarangense). The pretty pink fruits are refreshing, juicy but only subtly sweet. They look prettier than they taste in my opinion.
We also have vegetables, herbs and chillies - one of my favourite is Okra below:
Herbs are infact part of daily cuisine here and feature in every type of cooking, Chinese, Indian and Malay and in the fusion foods like Nyonya in Melaka and Penang.
Infact on a visit to my friend Richard's futuristic condominium in Penang, they have incorporated a living wall of herbs for the residents to use for cooking straight to the BBQ nearby. It is a joy to see the tradition of the herbal garden maintained even in a luxury development (City of Dreams https://cityofdreamspenang.com.my/)
Pandan - its aromatic leaves used in many savoury and sweet desserts. One of our favourites is Nyonya pandan-wrapped chicken and here is the best from Yum Yum Restaurant, Ipoh.
Pegaga (Centella Asiatica) medicinal herb
The living herb wall next to the BBQ on the deck of City of Dreams overlooking the city
One of the best examples of ornamental herbs has to be the ginger family (Zingiberaceae). I included a picture of the Heliconia Rostrata above which drapes over our porch - although strictly not a ginger, it has similar leaves and undergrown rhizomes. Gingers have had a resurgence of interest in them, not just as spices or ornamental plants, but for their medicinal properties, although this is not new as they have been part of traditional herbal remedies for millennia. These gingers grow wild in this region & in Malaysia alone, there are 320 species accounting for 40% of the world genera. Here are our two favourites:
Red Ginger (Alpina Purpurata)
These eye-poppingly red gingers are a joy to behold and come out just in time for Chinese New Year when red is a sign of prosperity and good luck. It is difficult to replicate these humid tropical conditions that encourage such prolific flowering indoors in UK and mine rarely bloom here.
Torch Ginger Lily (Etlingera elatior), or Bunga Kantan in Malay, has, in my opinion, one of the most stunning pink flowers of any ginger. In our garden, this has grown to heights of over 3 metres, with buds at the base from which the flowers appear. Although they are used for flower arrangements, their main purpose is as a herb for a classic dish, Assam Laksa, and a salad called Kerabu.
By contrast, the humble common ginger Zingiber officinale we can grow in UK is only about 1m high but provides us with a culinary must-have but not as pretty flowers.
I hope you enjoyed this different from the usual blog on houseplants. I will return with further blogs on this tropical visit home with images from nurseries, a feature on staghorn ferns, and looking at plants we have featured from previous blogs and how they thrive in their natural environment. With snippets of stories, wisdom and lots of fun along the way. Happy wacky planting! 👦🏻💜🌴
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