Gen Y Gardener

This is a new gardening column by green-fingered Ryan Su, who has been smitten by the gardening bug since he was six. Ryan, now 19, and in national service, has been responsible for landscaping his school garden at Victoria Junior College. Teachers and friends have also asked him to design their home gardens. In his maiden column, he muses about his affair with the Costus and why it captivates him.

It is both apprehensive and exciting to have my own little gardening column in AsiaOne.

I was a little nervous as I am still in the army and there are commitments. But I was persuaded to do it. I thought a little gardening and garden-talk can't do much harm and was eventually bought over

I intend to make this an informal platform for me to get on my soapbox and dish out the latest happenings in not only my garden, but in other peoples' gardens. I will write about our plants, and numerous crazy little outings, and gatherings and meetings unfolding in the local gardening and horticultural scene. In short, it is essentially a peek into my life, along with the lives of many others who live and breathe flora.

I talk a lot about blue chip plants most of the time. This group of plants is usually marked by their rarity and so can be worth considerable sums of money. Most of the time, they aren't very beautiful.

Well, the Costus is slight veer from this definition. This tropical plant is a member of the ginger family, and is native to Costa Rica. It is, in fact, rather beautiful. But the strange part is that the Costus still fetches high prices, relatively speaking, when compared to other landscape flora. I love using the Costus for its bright inflorescence, perky leaf colour and compact form. Its flower can stay for as long as a month on the plant. So, it is popular as a cut flower as well. But it needs a lot of water, otherwise it can be scorched easily by the sun, leaving its bracts with unsightly white burn marks. Landscape architect Burle Marx used them, the 'American Canna', most radically, en masse on terraces, when his local plants were spurned in favour of imported species.

Costus globosus

Then again, my own history with the Costus is short and ever evolving. I first heard about it from a friend who told me they grew at the feet of Heliconias at the Jurong Bird Park. (The horticulturist who planted them would eventually become my friend). The unavailability of the Costus and it being overshadowed by the raucous Heliconias which I was, at that time, crazy about, left it ignored and untouched, although the prospect of it being able to grow from cuttings did ignite ideas of a nicking mission that was never initiated. I guess I was never much one for adventurous escapades.

My next brush with the flower came when I ordered one from a website along with many Heliconia rhizomes because it was just so cheap. That plant turned out to be Costus productus x varzearum "Green Mountain", one of the few artificial hybrids of the genus. The rhizome took off, and soon I was the proud owner of a huge and fleshy plant with purple stems and orangey flowers. It was then when I first learnt my first lesson about the Costus - that it hates being parched in the heat of day. The plant would soon succumb to aphids due to enormous water stress. No amount of watering would keep the midday sun from drying up the soil.

On one of my projects with a jungle theme, I played with the idea of how the round, hairy and light colored leaves of the Costus malortieanus contrasted with the stringy weeds growing on a slopeface. The curious composition was most beautiful, with Costus clumps sprouting out magically amid a sea of wild grass. Its downfall came when the ignorant grasscutters came one day and attacked the grass, which brought the Costus down as well.

I would learn my second lesson about the plants here - that the Costus, while commonly used as edging for lawns and planting beds, is defenceless against grasscutters. It's something to bear in mind when thinking about positioning and maintenance. While temporarily down and out, the resilient Costus soon rebounded from their underground rhizomes.

My final Costus lesson came when I obtained a plethora of rare collector's varieties that would make me look at the genus with fresh eyes. The Costus family is extremely versatile, with taller varieties acting as useful screens, while the smaller ones fulfill their responsibilities as ornamentals by sitting pretty in beds.

There are also some variegated versions with milky swirls on their leaves. Also in my collection is the rubra variety of the indigenous Costus speciosus, the Crepe Ginger, with its peculiar burgundy stems and leaf undersides. Together with the more common Costus erythrophyllus, their dark accents provide depth to planting schemes. Costus villosissimus, the Porcupine Costus, is not only a visual treat with its sulphur coloured flowers, but also a sensory one with its extremely fuzzy leaves that I just have to touch whenever I walk past the plant in the garden.

This is indeed a family of plants with endless possibilities! Oh, do you know that Costus flowers are edible and add much needed zest to a flat salad?