What an AWARD-WINNING Tropical HOME & GARDEN looks like | Landscaping ideas with easy plants

Hi everyone, my name is Irene and welcome to my channel Living Around where we talk all about plants and tropical gardens. Today I am so so happy and excited to bring to you a tour of not just a beautiful garden but a beautiful home. A house that has won awards at a Malaysia very prestigious architectural award, the PAM. But before we go into the house, let's tour the garden a little. And before we start, I just want to share with you that this is the garden not of a plant craze and a very hands-on gardening person. This is the landscape and the garden of someone who appreciates green spaces and would like to have a nice garden to enjoy. The plants that we see here today are more the easy to care for plants, which is good news for some of us, and also more accessible and you don't have to be so hands-on about it. Hey Lucas! Hi, okay my friend here Lucas is furiously doing gardening just before we film because we didn't have time to touch up. So this garden is not like touched up and curated prior to the shooting. It's happening right now. So I just want to introduce Lucas Goh. He's a fabulous designer in Kuching and he has helped to design parts of the house. Okay welcome to Borneo Mansion. So today Lucas, I will be doing the tour. You need to do gardening very fast before I get to the section. Go ahead. Is there a particular plant you want to point out to me? I think they're all interesting. These are the Heliconias. Oh yeah. This one, they're kind of rare in Kuching. Those are those ones. Longissima. Those actually grow up to about nine feet. Wow okay yes okay let's go there and check out the Heliconia he's talking about. I'll leave you to your gardening chores. So as you walk in, you are greeted by a row of Heliconias and I do love Heliconia for landscaping. This one I believe is the Heliconia Caribia and it's really bright red and really pop. You can see some some bracts flowers here but actually the owner has cut down a lot and use it for interior decoration like a cut flower. So now let's come up. Oh here you can see a row of Crotons. Crotons are very easy plants. They are quite forgiving. You can have it in full sun or partial sun and let's see what else. Okay here now we are at the front of the house and as you can see there are some perforated wire things that's like in triangular protruding shape and this is very interesting very unique. It is inspired by the pinnacle at Miri. So this house is very much nature inspired and now let's come to oh okay here we have actually the Golden Chain. The Golden Chain is a tree that gives out this beautiful bracts yellow yellow flowers that hangs down and this is not native to Malaysia. I was told that our ex-minister Dr Mahathir, his wife Siti Hazma actually brought this plant in from abroad many decades ago and this is how this first plant got into Malaysia. I can't remember what country it was. Okay so I will now hop over actually later we will pop into the house. So I will now hop over to this cluster of Heliconia that's here. Okay here this is the patch of Heliconia. I believe this is called the Heliconia Longissima and you know what this leaf I think is a little diseased. I am gonna help them to get rid of it so you can also see the wrap better. So okay so whoops. So this Heliconia, the common hanging ones that we know is the Rostrata. The Rostrata has a tinge of yellow but this one is completely red. This is not at its prime. It's a little bit past its prime so it doesn't look as vibrant the red but this can grow very very long like up to nine feet I was told and I do have one at home. Actually I got mine after I saw it here about a couple of years ago and I was really inspired. So this is a fresher one and it's not very long yet so there's still more room for it to go down. So Heliconia Longissima if you want something that really has the height and you enjoy having this long red bracts. Here we see the Heliconias are grown in the middle patch and it is given a lot of room so there's no other plants that's like very close to it and Heliconias do need their space and so if you're thinking about Heliconia do be aware that they can spread very fast. In fact in some areas they're considered as weeds but I just love them. These large tropical leaves you know gives a really nice tropical feel to any garden. So if you want to control the growth of your Heliconia do put in about two feet of some blocks. For me at home I've put two feet worth of bricks inside so that it doesn't grow beyond that to kind of contain its growth within a particular area and another thing to note for Heliconia is that once you have the bracts out like this one so you only flower once. So after this is done then you do need to cut down this particular stalk because it will never flower again and when you cut it then it will encourage new growth and new shoots. And just to give you a little more appreciation of the entire thing we have some tall trees that's around and if you look up they are giving then a rather nice shade to the garden. So these Heliconias at the bottom are enjoying filtered light. They are not in direct sunlight although they can also withstand quite a bit of sunlight. So we've now gone to the backyard while Lucas furiously works the front yard before we get there and I'm gonna go through the garden with this too so that I could help her to cut down any leaves that needs to be trimmed. Okay so here my favorite plant here in this section is this Cyclanthus Bipartidus. I can't remember what it's called. Cyclanthus Bipartidus is this plant. So actually I had thought this is some kind of a fern but it's not. It's a different genus so I used to call it the rugby fern tree but yeah it's a Cyclanthus Bipartidus and here it has grown into huge amazing chunks. Look this is all of it that's right here and so this makes me realize I should put mine on the ground because I've got mine currently in pots and they are pretty tiny and look at what happens when they're on the ground. They look like they're about 15 feet tall and this is just incredible. Huge foliage. I hope you can appreciate that. Right over here we have the Alocasia Black Stem. So you could see the stem is so gorgeous. It's entirely black and its leaves are up there if you could see. It's getting really big now that one with this black vein as well so it's a really nice contrast. So a little more special than the usual Alocasia Micaresa and this one leaves getting old. I'm gonna help them cut it away. It looks maybe a little diseased too. I'm not sure so oops. Okay and then more Heliconias and so let's do some maintenance of these brown leaves that we no longer need. Okay so this stem, this one actually you could see all the leaves that it has now is the single leaf that is brown so I will actually even cut off right at the bottom so because this is now yeah past its life. Gives way to new growth. Oh I want you to take note of this little walkway. It's really really enveloping you as you walk through because of the layering effects. So you could see there are plants that's on the ground and then there are Heliconias arising up from it and then there's also flanked by trees so really forming this archway that gives you that nice cozy feel. A lovely pathway to walk through and all sorts of plants are interspersed here. This is the fig tree actually the common fiddle fig lime no fiddle fig tree. So a lot of people try to plant this indoor actually because a lot of Instagram photos show this tree being planted indoor but in my experience it does much much better outdoor. I had a lot of problems with pests with this tree indoor. Ficus lirata that's the proper name of this fig tree which I forgot. Now I just want to move back to where we were before because I missed out a few things that I forgot to show you. So this is what we call pandan. So the pandan is commonly used here to flavor dessert or soup whatever cooking and here so this is an edible and Lucas was just sharing with me that this is actually very good for deterring snakes in the garden. So if you're someone who's worried about snakes and you're looking for some plants to deter them so apparently they don't like the pandan and they are very very easy growing plant they do need a fair amount of sunlight to keep it healthy though. And another easygoing plant is actually the spider lily. They look gorgeous and the good thing about it is actually they're very easy to care for. You could just leave them here on the ground and they make really good ground covers they grow up to about your waistline well my waistline anyway because I'm pretty pretty short. So another easy plant if you are looking for something for landscaping and you do not want to be that hands-on gardener. And then I would like to draw your attention to the tree that's here. The layman like me call it the leopard skin tree because look at the beautiful gorgeous patterns and it tends to shed its bark so the Chinese will call this 脱皮树 literally saying it sheds its skin a tree that sheds its skin. I will try and drop the proper name for the tree somewhere here below but look at this gorgeous gorgeous patterns so I think I have a few of them too in my own home they are just quite decorative actually the trunk. Oh and yes the ginger plant Lucas was sharing with me also that the ginger plant actually flowers profusely or any flowering plants actually if you give it this special fertilizer that he's discovered so what he does is he soaked the skin of the onion onion skin soak for a couple of days in water and then use this water to water his flowering plants he swears by it that the flowers just bloom really a lot after that so a good tip there for you do try it and let me know if it works. I almost forgot there are begonias right here on the ground it's kind of amazing to me because I grow mine mostly in pots and here they are as ground covers so I'm gonna investigate a little bit on actually what they are grown in and it seems like they are in some kind of a sandy soil and then it looks like yeah it doesn't have any particularly special care just left on its own to thrive amazing and this plant I'm not sure the name of it so if you do know it please let me know again Lucas was sharing with me that you can use this to boil tea and it's actually very nutritious very cooling and look at there's like the maroon purple underside to it it looks quite pretty too it's almost like you know blue yeah it's kind of greenish blue with this purple undertone and then as you look up there is more of this plant that I keep forgetting the name but it's in this shape of like rugby balls very nice and let's see what else we have we have here heliconius that needs to be trimmed and then again alocasia black stem um yeah this could be like I'm not sure it could be a fungal infection you know what I just thought of something I've just done something that's not very good practice because after you cut a plant that especially if you think they're diseased you should really clean the cutter and disinfect it so that you don't infect the other plants so please remember to do that and do not do just what I did and I'm just gonna stop cutting anything now and now let's draw our eyes down to the ground there are some nice caladium this is the Thai beauty or this is much more vibrant so the more sun you give this actually the more vibrant this caladium will be and oh this is a plant I'm not familiar with at all it seems really interesting the leaf has another leaf look at that and then but this one doesn't yet oh this one has like two full grown leaves um in it oh wait I've also spotted that there's a tray here I think they should remove it otherwise it gathers water and that's not good for a mosquito okay what else okay this is the elastica rubber tree and very easy going Lucas was just telling me so easy to care for it does not die at all on him anyway okay now actually we're at kind of like a center courtyard where there is this huge tree and it's the house there's like three sides of the house surrounding it so as you can imagine then if you are inside the house and you're looking out this is kind of like bringing nature into your living room and the dining room and the kitchen and what do we have here we have quite simple and easy plants