Speech by 2M Desmond Lee at the Opening of the Community Garden Festival at HortPark

Nov 3, 2017

A very good morning to all of you. I’m very happy to be here at HortPark with all of you this morning to open this year’s Community Garden Festival.  Today, we celebrate the passion and achievements of our community gardeners. Thank you for helping to keep Singapore lush and green, and increasingly edible.
    
Some of you may remember that the community gardening movement started 12 years ago at the Mayfair Park Estate. Residents of Mayfair Park Estate had approached NParks for tips on how to landscape their roadside verges. Given this interest, we launched our first Community in Bloom, or CIB, garden at Mayfair Estate in 2005. Our hope then was that such gardens would foster community spirit and create a sense of belonging. We had totally exceeded our expectations! From the humble beginnings, we now have 36,000 gardening enthusiasts tending to more than 1,300 community gardens island-wide! A wonderful achievement, congratulations to all of you. Gardens have sprung up not only in residential estates, but also in our schools, and indoors! It is really fantastic.  
 
We want to continue to support this. That is why we have expanded HortPark. You may have noticed a colonial-era bungalow with a vibrantly landscaped front when you entered the park today. It is landscaped with a lot of flowering plants, and the plants frame this colonial bungalow – which many of you may have seen vacant for many years as you come in and out of this place. Today, it is now part of HortPark. This used to house Malayan Railway staff. It is now known as HortHouse. NParks has transformed it into a space for programmes and activities to cultivate greater expertise among our gardening as well as our landscape community, and classes will begin there in January 2018.

We will also do more to support edible gardening. NParks noticed that fruit and vegetables were grown in about 80 per cent of our CIB gardens in public housing estates. The number of entries for our Community Garden Edibles Competition also increased over the years, and this is a clear indication that this is an area that you are all very interested in. So I am happy to announce that NParks will be launching a new Edible Horticulture Masterplan. This Masterplan will benefit our gardening enthusiasts in a number of ways, and let me spell out a few.
 
First, we will provide more space for the public to grow edibles – to grow your fruit and vegetables. Last year, NParks launched 80 allotment gardening plots here at HortPark. Given the overwhelming response, we will launch another 160 allotment plots here today, and we will extend this scheme to 10 other parks across Singapore. More space for you to grow your edibles, and more space for you to pull your friends and kakis to come and grow edibles together. These include Punggol Park, Clementi Woods Park and Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. Eventually, we plan to have over 1,000 allotment gardening plots for you all to use and to enjoy with your family, friends, neighbours and community.

Second, we will provide more training courses for people who are interested in growing edibles – because it’s not just about having the land and having the will to plant. It is also a challenge, you want to do better, you want to grow it better, bigger, fresher, more delicious, and so having some skills and training is useful, and in fact, important. To complement AVA’s existing Master Grower Programme, NParks will be introducing courses that cover a broader range of edibles. These courses will help our community gardeners further enhance your already very commendable skills – whatever you are already very good at, we want to help you do it even better. 

 Third, we will introduce more edible species and technologies. Through research and experimentation, NParks has introduced many interesting species to the public. We have introduced more than 200 types of fruit trees and edible plants over the past 20 years. Some examples that visitors will see at the show are the different species, varieties and cultivars, for example 10 mangoes, 4 longans, 10 mints and 12 chillies – many different species. NParks will ramp up its efforts to expand the varieties available to all of you. It will also continue to experiment with indoor technologies, as many Singaporeans live in high-rise apartments, in HDB, and that may have limited access to sunlight. I understand that grow lights can be easily set-up so that you can grow tomatoes and even uncommon species like the Ice plant at home. On the way in, if you walk through the exhibition, you see people growing edibles under artificial lights, and that will help you to overcome the direction of the sun, or the lack of sunlight in your homes, in your balconies. You can check out the various displays at the Festival today, and that may open up a new horizon to all of you.

Last but not least, we want to reach out to even more people when it comes to edible gardening, because the process can help bring communities and neighbours closer together.  To do this, NParks has worked with CIB groups to establish two new community garden trails at Bukit Gombak-Hong Kah North as well as Teck Ghee. This adds to the three existing trails we have at Bukit Panjang, Tampines and Fengshan. I would like to thank all our CIB groups at these areas for opening up your gardens to the public, and being so very generous with your knowledge and expertise with all of them. I encourage more CIB groups to step forward and partner NParks in this area. Together, when you open up these trails and you welcome members of the public, your neighbours, your friends to come and visit, walk through, and you showcase your gardens to them, you can get even more Singaporeans involved in our Community in Bloom movement. 

Let me now shift gears a little bit, and shift the focus. Apart from edibles, ornamentals like orchids are also a favourite among our gardeners, it is certainly a favourite for me. In fact, orchids are core to our Singaporean identity. The Vanda Miss Joaquim is our national flower and we reinforce bilateral ties and forge friendships with other countries through the naming of orchid hybrids. Every time a foreign dignitary comes, you see in the newspapers, we have a new orchid hybrid, and we name it after our distinguished friend. In this context, NParks will be taking over the management and development of the orchid sector from AVA next year. This will consolidate the entire landscape industry under NParks, and enable better coordination to sustain, transform, and grow the entire landscape sector including our orchid growing sector.

In closing, I want to thank all of you here for helping to keep Singapore lush and green. Our industry partners, our community gardeners, and our volunteers – it is really what you do, that truly makes us a City in a Garden. So please continue, share your passion, share your delight with your neighbours, excite them, excite your friends and families too. I certainly hope you enjoy this Festival, which is really all for you. Thank you.