My Garden

Pic: Those small white innocent looking flowers produced such a strong sweet smell that enough to make people feel like drunk! It's called "Kemuning". I owned about 50 - 60 plants here and one mature "Kemuning" tree. They can grown into a medium size tree, but the one you saw here is the dwarf species type and it can only grow to around 1 meter tall.

Pic: This plant looks like a butterfly in the daytime and when it is night time, the leaves will fall down and make a pyramid shape. Very cute !

Pic: When the seller told me that this mini shrubs is called Taiwan, I just got to buy them all, can you guess why??? ( Hint: My hubby's nationality )

Pic: My lovely rosemary, I have about 10 of them and all of the cactus belong to my son. I don't know why he loves cactus very much.

Pic: My beautiful orchids, I have about more than 30 different colors but not all of them were in bloom when I took this shot.


The last time I wrote an update about my garden was on March 3, 2007 and now it has already past one year from that time and my garden just keeps on evolving because the truth is that I don't know yet what style is and I am still trying to understand the characteristics of Indonesian tropical plants and which plants can grow well in my garden based on the amount of light that every part of my garden has or not.

If you want to see the previous entry about my garden, you can click here.

Here in Indonesia, the people who loves gardening are very trend oriented. I have no idea who set the trend but boy.... I bet they makes millions of dollars. Let me explain. In the past a year or so everybody who loves plants have been buying pretty much the same type of plants. When some friends hear that I love plants, they will ask automatically if I have that plant. I can't recall all the names, but one of them is so easy to remember, it's called "Gelombang Cinta" translated to " Wave of Love", another name is Jemanii and I think the scientific name is Anthurium. What ever that is, it cost an arm and a leg! The highest I heard is around several million Rupiah which is just totally crazy. In fact my notary sister's anthurium that recently received an offer to sell for Rp. 100 millions ( US $ 11.000 ) have just been stolen !

Pic: "wave of love ", anthurium. This plant may cost around Rp. 30 millions ( US $ 3,300 )

Funny thing is, I saw the same plant in my mother in law's balcony in Taipei and in Taipei it doesn't even cost 1/100 of that 11.000 US Dollars ! There is another plant that can be sold for about that price too and again I saw those plants looking quite pitiful ( not enough sunlight ) in front of a hotel in Taipei. I forgot the name. But to proof it to the people who live in my home that I was not lying I took the picture of those plants. Here are my proof ...



That's why when I started to renovate my garden, I made it clear to the garden store owners that this buyer will not look for what ever plants that is in fashion, and will not buy any plants that cost more than Rp. 300.000 ( US $ 30 ), and this buyer is only looking for either an indigenous plants of Indonesia or plants that has been brought to Indonesia for a long time that way I reduce the possibility of that plants to die in my garden!

So what ever you see in my photo collections are guarantee to be cheap, hardy, and mostly indigenous plants of Indonesia.

That way I proof it to a lot of people that you don't have to own the trendiest plants to have a nice garden. I called it "Yohana's Cheap Garden"....hahaha ....

I have received a lot of comments from people who knows what my garden looked like before I return home. They always give a positive comment.

One of the thing that make me can not stop upgrading my garden is the enthusiast reaction that I always get from my children. Every time I can find a new plant that they have never seen before they love it! What do you think ?