Hong Kong Gardening – Naturally
By Tony Henderson
Preface
This book, titled Hong Kong Gardening – Naturally, has the more indicative practical title “Garden and Small Farm Practices for Asia”, and is compiled as a collection of personal notes – with particular regard for Hong Kong, (also the Philippines and a touch of Bangladesh) – largely on observing and practically coming-to-terms with the wilderness while gardening by our door at Mui Wo Kau Tsuen, on Lantau Island, Hong Kong, SAR, China.
The semi-tropics of Hong Kong with its wet months and high humidity is ideal for insect life which is rampant but this does not bode well for gardeners and farmers as there are numerous pests from insects to bacteria that feed off crops – butterflies, charmingly numerous, are another indicator of this ‘problem’. Philippines and Bangladesh are tropical rather than sub-tropical zones.
To get expert views on our climate in regard to growing, let us turn to The Ferns of Hong Kong. Herklots and Gibbs, published 1930:
“The factor which must be considered first and is certainly of primary importance is that of Climate. Hongkong is situated just within the tropics being 1° 10″ South of the tropic of Cancer but the climate is much more of a sub-tropical than of a tropical nature. During the summer months of May to September the weather is certainly tropical being hot and humid but during the winter months both temperature and humidity drop considerably. As a rule the rainfall is restricted almost entirely to the months of March to September though in some years, as in the summer of 1929, the winter drought continued till April or May.”
There are particular constraints when gardening hereabouts on Lantau as the place is bereft of any farming infrastructure; that is, no rice production with its useful by-products, no chickens or pigeons owing to scares about Avian Flu and for an even longer period, no pigs – pig farming banned.
In this writing I give a short introduction to Dai Yu San, or, Lantau. Also, a note on “Mila’s Garden”, as it has come to be known.
Included here are a few selected recipes gleaned from friend also their input on seeing a particular plant which unbeknown to us was a useful addition to country fare in their region.
I have pretty much followed the convention with names of plants where the Latin name is always in two parts. The first name is the genus always capitalised. The second part is the species name, always lower case. Both italicised. The importance of following the Latin names was very soon realised when gardening as common names are so variable.
Occasionally, Fieldwork gets a mention. This place is two ridges over from Mui Wo Kau Tsuen, towards Lantau South Road.
In recent years Mila has taken on other’s gardens and these had peculiarities of their own. Loretta’s for instance in Lok Tei Tong is on marshy, easily flooded ground.
Our garden has been ‘pioneered’ from the doorstep to include the land whereon the old school of this village was standing – the Tsoi family children all attended that school and Ah Wah, second son, has regaled us with stories of catching wild life from his youthful days over a beer or two (or three) – and our table of conviviality stands on the remains of the playground. The disintegrated asbestos roof had to be carefully removed by government contractors after a water channel was hewed out of the top-end to prevent village flooding in heavy rains.
While producing this as an easy-to-print eBook another line of thought allows the data to be used with the usual “Find” feature on any word processor program, then particular terms can be easily located and where duplicated entries have been made, further pertinent information also.
In addition, this is surely an ongoing work which can be personalised and used as a database to be developed according to the user’s requirements – for me I needed a reference for re-identifying plants names that I so easily forgot – thus the photos are of the lesser known plants.
All the photographs were taken locally, by me, most in the garden itself and a set of photographs are on the DVD, as a slide show. This relieves the print version of too many photographs which helps conserve printing ink and speeds up searches. This book is the printable version, on Adobe Acrobat as a .pdf format file.
Tony Henderson
November 22, 2011
Mila’s birthday
http://www.humanist.org.hk/hkgarden.html
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