Me and Plants

(Personal Blog Post)

I've been really busy with work. I've done stuff ranging from music, my kampong (that's Malay for home village), to English Language to taking kids on tours to the Botanic Gardens. Now that last one was really weird for me.

You see, I am not really interested in plant life. You know those people they say have green thumbs? I'm not one of them. Plant life in general is too organic for my liking. My appreciation for plant life and vegetation is limited to really liking french fries. I know nature is good, and I want my two sons to appreciate and enjoy nature.

Just don't ask me to join them, OK?

Anyway, because a good friend of mine asked me to help him with the learning journeys he was conducting for a secondary school, I agreed. The whole thing didn't start off well. Because I almost never go to the Botanic Gardens, I keep forgetting how large the place is. My friend organized a training session for us guides, and I ended up an hour late because my cab delivered me to the wrong part of the Gardens and it took me ages to walk to the correct meeting point. As I was hurrying to the meeting point I was already muttering to myself "I hate this... Why did I ever agree in the first place... And why can't they make this place one of those itty-bitty little parks so that I won't have to walk so much?!???!?"

The actual tour itself went quite OK. The kids were quite well-behaved (compared to some other kids I was afflicted with recently). Of course there were moments when I felt really embarassed. Like this one: I was giving a brief, rehearsed explanation on some of the plants the kids saw that day. When the kids asked me some questions I hastily improvised some answers that sounded good but had little factual substance. (Parents, that is the lifeskill your kids will learn in the Arts & Social Science faculty of the National University of Singapore. Be warned!)

A few minutes later I found out the sweet young lady following that class, nodding politely at my explanations, was their geography teacher, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the plants there at the Botanic Gardens, and who had been preparing the kids for that trip by teaching on the types of plants they would come across. In other words, the kids probably knew more about the plants than I did!

Ah well, such things happen...

Anyway, the interesting thing about this experience was that after helping out with that tour, I found that despite my lack of interest I started noticing the plant life around me more. For example, one of the plant types I had to explain to the kids was Epiphytes. These are plants that grow on other plants but not in a parasitical way.

After the tour I shelved the information on them into the Recycle Bin of my mind (to be deleted because it's useless to my life). But as I was travelling to my students' homes for teaching, I keep seeing epiphytes everywhere. Yes, they were there before all the while, but because I was ignorant my eyes just skimmed past them as if they weren't there. Now I found myself noticing them. I'd look at the following plant and think: "Bird's Nest Fern! They trap fallen leaves from the host plant for compost. And those little strands below the dead fern leaves should be Shoestring Ferns, right?"

God help me, I'm actually interested now!

And I even find myself going up close to the plants to get a better look. See that fern at the right, the one with all the triangle shaped leaves or leaf clusters or whatever you call them? That's a Rabbit's Foot Fern. I'm told that it's named thus because of the shoot (that little brown thingy in the middle of the pic) is supposed to resemble a rabbit's foot. Brown, thin, furry and bent at an angle.

The other guide who was with me was commenting "Does it really look like a rabbit's foot to you? It doesn't to me. Do scientists come up with these plant names when they are drunk?"

Anyway, I'm really hoping that after I get all this stuff off my chest I can go back to my usual world, thinking about how to manage my regular life, get better at my music and take good care of my kids. I really have to stop staring at every possible epiphyte I come across and taking pictures of them with my handphone. I've already got enough to do! :)