Last week I went to Gardens By the Bay with my family. Tulipmania was winding down, and we wanted the chance to walk through a tulip garden. I love tulips. I have ever since a friend of my mother once sent her a breathtaking bouquet of pale white roses and waxy tulip buds wreathed in cool green.
I've heard lots of complaints about Gardens By the Bay but my father worked on the project for several years before he retired and I've come to trust that when they take on a big project, they generally do it right.
Well, it was beautiful.
The temperature of the Flower Dome seemed to have dropped as well, to keep the masses of flowers perky. My father and mother took a slow stroll with their friends while I went nuts with the camera. (I brought my kit lens and though it did cross my mind that the primes might have produced better quality, the kit lens worked out for all the wide shots.)
The theme was Holland, obviously, right down to the languidly turning windmill at the heart of the garden. They kept looping a faintly ridiculous track of some woman yodelling like in Charlie's Angels (anyone remember that scene?) which made things very festive.
The tulips were planted in barrows, baskets, pots and right down the middle of the dome, in swathes of colour.
Up close, a tulip is a thing of wonder; it looks like it was breathed into life. My mother pointed out that right before a tulip dies, it blooms properly, flinging its petals wide, baring its whole heart. That made me a little sad.
Of course, as always, there were other flowers. I'm a big fan of these velvety kangaroo's paws. Up close, they resemble a delicate furred forefoot.
As the afternoon sun crept up, the automated shades started drawing closer to keep the flowers cool. It was impressive to finally watch them in action.
I wore what I call my "flappy pants". I own three pairs of these, purchased from various seaside towns in Thailand. They are loose, soft and invariably covered in elephants. They are so comfortable that I feel like I'm wearing pajamas and if I could, I would wear them all day. (As it is, I sometimes cheat by donning them for work with a more starched top.)
I made my mother sit and pose in tonnes of photos. In this one, I told her to look pensively into the diatance. She was actually laughing behind her hair. How we suffer for our art!
Afterwards, my father went over to the office to meet his ex-colleagues for a cuppa and I was left to wander round the office. I love the Gardens By the Bay office. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, all the furniture is old, heavy wood and the walls are hung with Balinese scrolls. The other thing I love is the surfeit of weird animals. There are terrariums dripping with wet plants and plump, glutinous frogs. The four fish tanks hold all manner of swiftly flicking breeds of fish. This time, they were even rearing scorpions. I stopped to watch one hold its barbed tail over its back like a lantern and shuddered.
And in the lab room downstairs, the very silly Milo and Kopi-O.
After a lovely morning, we curved out of the Gardens and found a sign exhorting us to enjoy some satay.
So we did.
"The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,
Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts..."
-- A. E. Stallings
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