It was the start of the Jubilee Weekend, during which we would celebrate our country's 50th anniversary of independence. All of 2015 has been packed with celebratory activities and commemorative give-aways. We capitalised on the discounts on offer to visit Gardens by the Bay, one of Singapore's newer, more inventive and pleasant attractions.
Above: My favourite spot in the conservatories.
Below: Dragonfly Lake in the Gardens grounds, which we didn't have the time to explore fully.
The focus of our visit to the Gardens was to the two cooled conservatories, entry to both of which was charged, and half-priced on account of the weekend festivities. We hope the reader will forgive our extolling the landmark's engineering ingenuity over its botanical splendor. We really aren't engineering buffs. But the conservatories really do stand out for welding within their design the practical and the prudent to the aesthetic.
The cooled conservatories: engineering marvels
The design follows a gridshell structure, which is roughly a lattice network shaped gracefully like a shell. This combines elegance and structural strength, and removes the need for supporting columns which would reduce planting space and block precious sunlight. Ribcage-like arches hold the glass pieces in place and protect against strong winds. No detail is spared, with the curvature of the gridshell and the cross-sectional shape of the external supporting arches calculated to maximise light while minimising heat.
Below: the engineering marvels that are the conservatories.
The need to recreate climactic conditions to house plants from montane rainforests and semi-arid regions meant, expensively, cooling and dehumidification on a round the clock basis. The solutions were remarkably simple. Branches lopped off by NParks in their regular pruning of our roadside flora provided the bulk of the fuel needed to run the conservatories. These were brought to the Gardens and converted into energy in in-house furnaces built underground. What of the exhaust produced by the burning then? If chimneys were required as vents, wouldn't this mar what was surely meant to be verdant vistas? The way to graft this industrial requirement into the garden landscape saw the chimneys artfully disguised as Supertrees. More than just chimneys, the Supertrees also capture energy with in-built solar panels and support plant life by functioning as vertical gardens. Above all, they have become the Gardens' most recognisable feature.
Below: Who would have thought these to be chimneys?
Both conservatories run an air displacement system where only the air in the occupied zone (up to about the height of the tallest plant) is cooled. This reduces the amount of energy required, as compared to if the whole conservatory is cooled. The cooling is done by running chilled water through pipes built beneath the pavements.
Elsewhere, little goes to waste. Air that remains cool is recycled and rechanneled through the pipes. The liquid dessicants (substances used to absorb moisture in the air during the process of dehumidification) is recycled by applying the waste heat generated in the burning of the biowaste to it. This removes the absorbed moisture in the dessicant and enables it to absorb yet more in a renewed dehumidification process. Rainwater collected goes to water the gardens.
The Cloud Forest: bringing heaven to earth
But Gardens by the Bay wasn't an engineering field trip. I shall indulge my own bias here - I really went to see the waterfall in the Cloud Forest, the world's largest indoor waterfall. It is very pleasant if one doesn't stray too close (afterspray) or look either all the way up or down over the rail at its base. In the latter two instances, the falls resemble respectively an enormous faucet and an eternally flushing toilet.
The falls tumble from an artificial mountain - a miniature cloud forest planted vertically on a concrete frame. At appointed times throughout the day, the vegetation is watered by mist released in the upper reaches of the conservatory. This is what gives cloud forests their name - the very fact that in the natural world, they are very often enveloped by clouds. The pathways installed around the artificial mountain is a veritable stairway to heaven, in this case brought very much closer to earth. A stroll on this pathway (and a leap of the imagination) when the misting takes place puts one above the clouds, just six storeys above ground.
Above: The artificial mountain in the Cloud Forest.
Below: Carnivorous plants, real and fake.
The Flower Dome: a hidden world
Mary and her mother found the Flower Dome more appealing. As its name suggests, they were drawn like bees to the flowers on display. While the Cloud Forest felt, however artificially, more like a habitat, the Flower Dome we laid out more like a conventional garden. Cacti, baobabs and palms - other less-heralded inhabitants of semi-arid biomes - jostled with flowers for visitors' attention. But the main draw was still the Discover Singapore Stories exhibition, a series of floral displays comprising mostly orchids and some anachronistically bizarre sculptures hailing from Singapore's folklore. Amongst the latter was a unnaturally muscular Merlion made to look like Neptune, the Greek God of the Sea.
Above: Baobabs, palms and...
Below: ...flowers. In the background, Sang Nila Utama comes ashore to look for a lion.
Cultural kitsch aside, the world of plants was truly a different world. It was a hidden world of extravagant colours and surreal shapes, often passed over by the unaided eye as mere detail. My passport to this world was the Super-macro setting on my camera, which I only discovered that very morning. It was almost like using the Pym Particles from the recent Antman movie - stamens became towers, petals became kaleidoscopic throne halls and panicles transformed into horned hydras.
Below: Eyes, towers, throne halls and mythical monsters - welcome to the hidden world of plants.
Singapore has always been known as the Garden City, and would still be so without having Gardens by the Bay. But Gardens by the Bay is no mere garden. It is a vision of the future planted in the present - a vision of growth made sustainable against the odds.
In most places the world over, soil has been made sacral to a nation's identity, as if there was something in it that was incorruptibly primordial and hence indisputably native. The soil on which the Gardens stand, reclaimed, is of more recent vintage. That they also nurture, within the conservatories, plants originally from 'foreign' climes seems to show that botany recognises no nationality. A very different sort of language is spoken by this and the nod to sustainability - the language not of an inalienable national soil, but of transcendent internationalism.
