+ Garden | Nature's Corridor

Has always liked nature all my life. Born at home in a village best known as Kampong Ladang. A nice wooden house with zinc roof on stilts. I recalled the address as 30-E Lorong Ternak. Forgotten the postal code though.

I lived there until my senior year in high school before the government bought over the land for redevelopment and moved us to a flat at 275 Tampines St 22.

Have no idea why, but I did not care much about sports then. I was either studying or gardening. Yes gardening as it did not have to involve anyone else.

And yes, another favourite pass time was to day-dream up on a guava and sometime water apple tree that were in the compounds of my home.

I did this almost everyday after school. Just soaking up the afternoon tranquility, listening to the birds chirping and the sound of leaves flapping in the wind as the tree swayed from side to side.

The total relaxed feeling like I was truely in paradise was incredible.

To date, I have yet to feel exactly the same feeling even if I tried to duplicate it. Gone and covered almost half the world around.

Visited the many beautiful and interesting foreign places with my beloved wife and son - the people I treasure, but never could get that exact same feeling I had just up on a tree alone, with my thoughts and no cares in the world. True, genuine tranquility, close to nature.

Then again, I could have built-up that wonderful feeling all these years than it really was. I could never tell. All I know, I felt it so wonderfully in my mind's eye. So crisp and vivid that when I picture it in my mind, I can still sensed a tat of that feeling again.

So, as much as I want to feel that same feeling again, having nature close around me is second best. I had "green fingers" then. I could grow many vegetable plants as well as flowering plants too with no previous knowledge how.

I did get some tips from my late uncle Pak Long who lived across the street.

In fact he noticed that I liked gardening so much that he started to give me saplings of plants in pots for me to take care of.

With a flatted home I called my own at 734 Tampines Street 71, we have a "luxury" of an open corridor right at our doorstep.

It is here that I, with the help of my wife and son, recreate a small garden we call our own amidst this concrete jungle we live in.

Thank goodness so far none of the neighbours find our garden an eyesore that they would complain to the Town Council or HDB.

We just wanted to feel nature close to us, though HD and the Tampines Town Council have been doing a great job creating pockets of nature in and around our blocks of flats.

Flowering plants are my favourite because flowers makes everyone happy. They are bright, cheerful ornaments nature has to offer humans.

Yes, the insects need them the most, but us humans benefit the therapeutic feeling just by the sight it.

Sadly many a times, many people are just oo busy to just "stop and smell the roses."

Many go about in their daily routine fast in their lives, only to stop to relax during a scheduled vacation time they take off work, when the simplest form of all is the simple things we see in life daily.

I treasure the moment I see a flower bloom in my garden. Not many though, since the corridor gets minimal 2 to 3 hours of sunlight in the morning.

Not so condusive for a flowering plant since these need alot of sunlight. That is why it is even more satisfying when these plants do bear flowers and bloom happy.

I choose the plants I like, the more rugged the better, as I hate it when they die from our care, or so we think that is what we are doing.

So when they flourish, the feeling is wonderful.

My wife is a stay-home mom, so she takes the most care of the plants in our garden. She waters them every other day and with liquid fertiliser once every 2 to 3 weeks or so.

I just prune and loosen-up the soil in the pots on weekends when I get the chance. I rearrange them again from time to time to give some their turn to be in the sunlight spots.