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Stories from Our Dear Children Garden
Gardening is in the DNA of Singapore - a “Garden City”. When 3Pumpkins was invited to respond to the theme of natural heritage for Heritage Festival 2022, we were curious to find out the values and priorities of home gardeners through the plants they grow.
Over a 3-month process, we conducted interviews with 15 residents in Boon Lay Drive to find out more. We were excited to discover a full range of stories that came up: from helping incarcerated neighbours, recovering from strokes, providing the neighbourhood leaves for prayers, generating a second income, researching on plant specimens to pass time during the pandemic, to comforting deep pain from the loss of family members. These narratives span across emotional, mental and physical to spiritual health, pointing towards a common value of sayang (care) for the gardeners themselves and for others.
As with all 3Pumpkins’ projects, we strongly value a sustainable practice of knowledge generation and transmission within the community while seeking answers to our question. The idea of building a community children garden ground-up together with permaculturists, residents, local businesses was thus born. With the blessing of stakeholders such as NParks and Boon Lay Zone C RN, we were entrusted an allotment garden for 2 years not just to cultivate plants, but to transmit the rich stories of our residents and cultivate the values of care, patience, neighbourliness, and kindness.
How does the community sayang themselves and each other
with the plants they grow at home?
Lyrics from: https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=5203
Rasa Sayang is a widely known and well-loved Malay folksong.
The garden is named after the song as it connects different generations through its timeless tune and playful pantun (poems). Most importantly, the song embodies the values we would love to cultivate in the garden and is great to sing to while gardening! In response to our findings on how the residents take care of themselves and each other through the plants they grow, permaculturist Nova Nelson from Cultivate Central has also curated the garden to these 5 categories: Sayang our mind, Sayang our heart, Sayang our spirit, Sayang our body, Sayang our soil, Sayang our past, Sayang our future.
Permaculture plans for Kebun Rasa Sayang by Nova C Nelson, Cultivate Central
What can one expect to do in Kebun Rasa Sayang?
Besides occasional guided tours where we will share how the garden acts as a locus of an interdependent eco-system, we are also developing community garden routines every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday where residents can bring their children to participate in gardening activities including watering, weeding, pruning, harvesting, and composting. Little ones would be delighted to see creative installations created by artist Isabelle Desjeux where plant identifications are presented through cyanotypes, fence art created by Cheryl Gan and Stella Cheung, and perhaps to create some of their own art pieces too!