geography is fate?

nothing to do with geography, maybe fate? #7 of "My life as a magician's rabbit"

This historian's cliche is clearly not on the mind's of the Singapore organisers for the IMF/WB meeting, who defied our tropical fate by planting a row of sunflowers along Stamford Road (across the new National Museum and by the S'pore Management University).

In the Garden-City government's over-zealous stagemanship, it has thus ridiculed its own flora and clime to fulfil this miraculous blossoming of north american beauty. Oh, how I pity you sunflowers, the common ixora, the veritable Miss Joaquim, and you my beloved tropics!


animals from the african plain dropping by Singapore for last year's Lantern festival

I am reminded of a neighbour who lives just one floor below us. She has lined the corridor outside her flat with pots of plants, survivors from many Chinese New Years passed. Life in this highrise concrete garden is not easy for these plants, and they daily struggle against dust and the mutilating fingers of playful children and equally mischievous adults. There are signs of baldness but the leaves that persist seem healthy enough.

My neighbour must be a hard woman to please. Or perhaps she is thinking back on those days when she first bought these plants. How lovely their mini-oranges and soft pink flowers must have looked. She has therefore taken it upon herself to revive their past glories. Some these plants wear riboons - dusky pink rosettes discarded from hampers. And one of the plants she has match-made with stalks of fake sunflowers that are the size of a human head. These manufactured emigres bloom all year round. But they, too, like their host, have to bear the dust and the tropical sun. The latter may not have given them life, but they still bear its name and testimony of its presence in their gently fading petals.