Plant people
Half of the year’s gone. It seems like only yesterday when we parlayed the Villarroyo tag as a clincher for the rightful electoral success laid out from February to May. And now we have a new president, one we believe will do right by us. Don’t worry. I’m his boss and I’ll see to it he does.
For now, everything seems close to hunky-dory in our chosen world. We observed Fil-Am Day yesterday, and greeted our relations and friends in Ta-te a happy 4th. Nine days from now we’ll be doing the same to our French friends as we toast to Bastille Day at Sofitel by the bay.
We have several more sleepless nights to watch the last five games of the World Cup (a pity that the four best teams had to be pruned down to two over the weekend quarterfinals), till the Finals on July 11. Aargh, that’ll be on at 2 a.m. Not much fun in watching alone in one’s bedroom, so I should meet up with fellow strikers Charlson Ong and Juaniyo Arcellana at some sports bar for communal orgiastic excitement.
Unless, that is, Anne Curtis gets over her CP-cam photo-op moment onstage with Prez Noynoy, and comes over past midnight to blow my yellow vuvuzela straight from and all the way back to South Africa.
Argentina-Brazil as most pundits expected? I wouldn’t mind Argentina vs. Holland, but then that’ll make me take the jump from borderline to entirely bipolar. Germany-Holland? Germany-Brazil? Brazil-Holland? Any of these match-ups would promise beautiful football. But really now, who cares if Anne decides to stay the course, from 2:30 to 4:30 a.m.? As long as it doesn’t wind up as a penalty shootout.
Over at another front, unprecedented superstar free agentry in the NBA opens a summer season of speculation, and nail-biting dread for Cavs fans. Will he or won’t he stay? Methinks LeBron James is just making pa-cute like Baby James, but will affirm his loyalty to his home state, which can pay him $30 M more over six years. That means he and P-Noy can end their terns in glory at about the same time, doing right by the home crowd in furthering legacies.
Speaking of glory, it may still be hot and humid on most days, with thunderstorms ratcheting up precipitation on some afternoons. But it’s also been the time of year to revel on drives around the city and countryside (no wang-wangs of late, yehey!) and appreciate all the end-of-summer blooms.
Most narra trees, if rather uncommon, are done with their yellow cascades — the same with the near-ephemeral Golden Shower. Bougainvillea of all colors still adorn yards and roadsides. Banabas are in lilac flower, while caballeros offer a resplendent sight most everywhere that visionary greenery dots the landscape.
In the Ateneo and UP campuses, they are a sight to behold. At The Fort or Bonifacio Global City, the fine planning that went into large-scale development a decade ago now gifts us with growing flame trees, with most abloom, and which promise May-June splendor for years to come.
It was at The Fort, at a yet little-known oasis called Arts in the City (ARTS), on what’s billed as FVR Park on 26th Street corner 7th Avenue at Bonifacio Arts Center, where at the June 4 opening of the visual art exhibit “Ulan sa Tag-init” we heard patron Tony Boy Cojuangco speak of how this sanctum came into fruition. He made special mention of the landscape specialist Yuyung Lao as having been responsible for sprucing up the place with rare and endemic plant species.
This drew my green-thumb interest enough to seek out Mr. Lao for an audience one morning, amidst the foliage and landscaping items he had set in place at that triangular plot of land starting early in the year.
He recalled how the area used to be occupied by Dencio’s Grill, and also featured a mini-golf amenity. Some palms, primarily Champagne, Royal, and Hawaiian, had been planted, and had in fact grown tall in certain areas. And Yuyung said he didn’t have the heart or felt the need to replace them. He saw his task as simply one of augmentation, making use of the natural divisions in the area and retaining even all the cemented portions for walkways, as well as the central mini-plaza that now led to the performance areas and galleries.
What Yuyung brought in fresh were the Golden Vetcha palms, which had quite a story behind them. He recounted how sometime in the 1980s, a plant collector had imported a type of palm that he laid out in his garden. One day a happy accident happened, when an appliance he had placed beside one of the palms standing by a lanai had exploded. The shock and sudden heat caused mutation for that one tree, which began to produce lighter-colored fronds, almost of a weak yellow. And it became a collector’s item as years went by.
As he pointed them out, Yuyung acknowledged that the summer of 2010 had indeed been extremely torrid, so that the Golden Vetchas he had planted at FVR Park showed signs of searing heat. Most of the upper fronds looked rather burned and drooping. They didn’t appear as splendid as they should, for the nonce, anyway. But it was nothing that the rains wouldn’t soon rectify.
All around on the front garden were sets of basalt monoliths that served as centerpieces for a variety of bromeliads. Yuyung was particularly proud of the largest and most exotic, the Silver Bromeliad or arcantea odorata. It was also the most expensive, so the garden only had a few of those.
He pointed out the Indonesian type of what we here call carabao grass, which does best in shaded areas. It complemented the lawn of blue grass that required eight hours of sunshine daily, according to Yuyung.
Yes, I know, I said with enough braggadocio, just to let him know I wasn’t exactly a tyro with green stuff. I told him how I used to have a back lawn of blue grass, while the narrow front yard under leafy tree branches held carabao grass.
Ah, but the Indonesian variety I got from Bali is different, he said. It doesn’t require any pruning at all. True enough, the cute sod showed dark green curlicues that didn’t seem to threaten blade expansion.
He pointed out a side area by the grill fence where what he called Bangkok bamboo was planted during Dencio’s time, to serve as a screen alongside the pavement. He said it wasn’t suitable there, but again he had let it pass, simply extended the screening foliage with appropriate pole-vault bamboo.
Other species he had introduced included some stands of torch ginger, varieties of ti plants and still low podocarpus.
It’s fun to converse with plant people. You hardly talk about the rest of your own species, rather all about silent beautiful creatures that don’t need sex education in primary school or rhetorical appeals to behave. Why, you can even smoke beside them, as the mild-mannered Yuyung allowed me to do.
We shared notes (Ha! Told you I’m no parvenu!) on why caballeros only bloom in May and June in our country, mostly that is, since I let on that I’ve seen a magnificent fire tree afire by the plaza in Baler, Aurora, in February! And year-round in Bali!
Yuyung topped that, claiming to have identified a yellow caballero in bloom some 500 meters past the Naguillan toll gate to Baguio. And he opined that the young caballeros at The Fort weren’t all in bloom at the same time because they came from different stocks. Hmm. You learn something new every time you barter trivia with a gardener.
I said I had once met Mods Manglicmot, the bonsai specialist who now has a showcase right inside the UP campus. I cited Gerry Araos and his Antipolo Garden of Two Dragon... er, Effing, how I also enjoyed the man’s genius in starting up the forest garden behind the Pacific Plaza Towers right at The Fort.
Yuyung countered by relating how he had started out as a plant collector three decades ago, until the icon Serapion Metilla invited him to join a plant society. Now he does two to three private gardens a year as a pro. He was asked by Mrs. Ming Ramos to re-do the Malacañang gardens, but the usual side-whisper society of Pinoy crabs made him turn down the offer.
One time, he said, Angelo King had asked him to create a garden, the sixth landscapist to be given the task. After which the client gave him a rating of 98 percent. When Yuyung asked why the missing 2 percent, the aficionado simply laughed.
Or maybe I took down incorrect notes, so I hope this doesn’t get Mr. Lao into trouble. Suffice it to say that here was a man who loved plants and tended gardens, a man of my own heart. And he never had a siren blaring or blinkers blinking from his car’s hood. Well, very likely, make that a pick-up truck. Such is the macho-hood shared by gardeners.
What are the best local gardens you’ve seen, I asked. He avoided citing any Top Ten, but mentioned Butch Campos’ 2.5 hectares of garden at Alabang Hills, and also how he was so impressed going up the road to Pontevedra in Negros Occidental, seeing the neat rows of trees at roadside — clearly the handiwork of Danding and Gretchen Cojuangco.
Yes, I said, I’ve gone through that road myself. Similar spectacles may be found in Calatagan by Enrique Zobel’s farm and polo fields, and on the road to Sta. Barbara in Pangasinan, where age-old acacias provide a magnificent canopy.
Yuyung maintains a private retreat close to San Mateo, but still in Marikina, some 15 kilometers from Ateneo via the Sumulong Highway. Come visit sometime, he said with his usual smile. I will, I replied, I’d love to see your private garden.
Oh, by the way, Yuyung, I happen to have a couple of Palawan cherry trees I grew from seeds collected at Calauit Island. They’re outgrowing their large pots and I have no land space to transfer them to.
You can donate them here, he said, and I’ll place them there at that triangular plot where the mini-golf used to be, among all those small trees there.
Okay, great. They can be my legacy. Why, I can then say I’ve had my cake and eaten it too at FVR Park.
We shook hands on it, and I came away with “The Spirit” sort of in me, just like after Noynoy had delivered his excellent inaugural speech. Somehow, I kept thinking on my drive out of the Fort, if only we can plant people, why, we could weed out the bad sorts easily, and everyone would be so manicured into shape and form that it’ll be such a hunky-dory landscape forever.
