Malaysian creation shines at Singapore Garden Festival 2018

SINGAPORE: Malaysian veteran landscape designer Inch Lim has retained Best of Show and also bagged the Gold and Horticulture Excellence Awards in the competitive Landscape Gardens category at the recently concluded Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) 2018.

Lim, the founder of Inchscape, had also won these awards at SGF 2016. This time around, Lim emerged among the Best of Show winners with his creation called “The Wild and the Restless”. The 80 sq m garden celebrates the beauty of wayside plants.

The SGF is a biennial event and is one of the top flower and garden shows on the international calendar. It brings together award-winning landscape and garden designers, florists and horticulturists from around the world.

Organised by the National Parks Board (NParks) and Gardens by the Bay, the seventh edition of Asia’s premier tropical floral and garden show received a record of more than 600,000 visitors.

This year’s festival was conceptualised as a tropical rainforest garden with pockets of gardens and displays in line with the festival’s theme, “World of Colours!”.

The floral wonderland featured 73 displays put together by 40 internationally and locally acclaimed floral and garden designers, as well as community gardeners, amateur and student designers, bonsai enthusiasts and NParks talents.

Leon Kluge from South Africa was another repeat winner. His Fantasy Garden entitled “African Thunder” scored the highest among the Gold recipients to secure Best of Show in the Fantasy Garden category, as well as the Horticulture Excellence Award. In 2016, Kluge won Gold and Best Outdoor Lighting for his Landscape Garden.

“A Tropical Parody” by Singapore’s Chang Huai-yan and Ng Sze Oun was voted by festival visitors the People’s Choice Award winner.

Meanwhile, “Garden of Rosaceae: Our Enchanted Home” by community gardeners from the South East CDC received the Gardeners’ Choice Award. This was determined by visitors’ votes for displays in the friendly Gardeners’ Cup competition.

NParks also curated a number of non-competitive displays such as “The Mountains”, “Gothic Gate” and “Lost Forest” that provided a variety of experiences for visitors coming through each SGF entrance.

There was also an Asean Garden that depicted the unity and strength of the regional bloc; as well as a Secret Garden of Edibles – a collection of fragrant and flowering edible plants from temperate and tropical regions.

Another non-competitive display at SGF 2018 was “Orchid Extravaganza at Flower Dome” by home-grown award-winning film director Royston Tan.

More than 14,000 orchids of over 120 varieties were showcased in a stunning arrangement conceptualised by Tan.

This story first appeared in the EdgeProp.my pullout on Aug 10, 2018. Download EdgeProp.my pullout here for free.