image: In a first, SMU Professor Fiona Williamson traces the growth of edible gardens in Singapore.
Credit: Singapore Management University
By Christie Loh
SMU Office of Research – Contributing to Singapore’s collective memory-making, a team led by Singapore Management University’s (SMU) environmental historian Fiona Williamson has completed the first-ever historical overview of the country’s edible gardens.
The endeavour shines a light on an under-studied area and adds to the national cache of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
As a ‘Garden City’, Singapore’s green spaces such as the public parks and the Botanic Gardens are well documented. In comparison, relatively little has been written about vernacular edible gardens including kampong (Malay for ‘village’) gardens and those found in the corridors of Housing Development Board (HDB) flats.
“Due to their utilitarian (and often visually unappealing) character as food production spaces, many historical gardens in Singapore have been left out from the mainstream ‘Garden City’ narrative despite being well-documented by historians working in other sub-fields,” Professor Williamson wrote in the report submitted in August 2024 to the National Heritage Board (NHB), which funded the two-year project. Joshua Ngee Chae Goh, who is in SMU’s Asian Urbanism Postgraduate programme, was the project’s Principal Research Assistant and Collaborator.
The team combed through official documents, maps, diaries, photographs, and newspapers – spanning the 19th century and into present-day – kept in various local collections including the National Library, the National Archives, and the Biodiversity National Library.
From these primary sources, a picture emerged of how the British colonial government brought the Garden City Movement, which linked gardening to urban wellbeing, into Singapore during the early 20th century. The call to “grow your own food” took on urgency during World War I and afterwards, as a string of environmental and economic crises disrupted global supply chains.
Hardship tapioca in WWII
It was during the three-year Japanese Occupation in the 1940s that edible gardening became compulsory and punitive.
In response to food shortages, the Japanese government made tapioca-planting mandatory by law and converted large open spaces including parks and roadsides into vegetable-growing plots. Civil servants and all unemployed women and men aged 18 to 30 were conscripted to work in those new plots. Ubi kayu (Malay for ‘tapioca’) for breakfast, lunch and dinner became the norm for many, especially when the Japanese government slashed rations for other food items such as rice.
“I was surprised at the extent to which people were being pushed into gardening during the Second World War, a far greater scale than I had expected, and how badly some of those experiments went wrong,” Professor Williamson told the Office of Research in an interview.
By the time the Japanese surrendered in 1945, tapioca had become so repulsive to the people that many of them reportedly declared with joy, “Our ubi kayu days are over!’ as they waited for the returning British Royal Marines to alight on shore.
“The ‘Grow More Food ‘slogan of the war years was synonymous with forced labour and extensive urban gardening was disregarded as soon as the political situation returned to some semblance of normalcy,” Professor Williamson wrote in her research report.
Today, young Singaporeans may regard certain war-time foods – such as sweet potatoes and tapioca – as “retro”, she said. However, official calls for the import-reliant country to grow its own food have remained strong in light of increasing volatilities in the global supply chain. The government has also promoted initiatives such as community gardens “as a healthy, wholesome activity for ordinary people and community building”.
Talking to the gardeners
Besides unearthing historical gems in their research, Professor Williamson’s team have produced a bounty of oral testimonies, which have become a popular and useful tool for historians of vernacular gardening in developed nations such as the United States and New Zealand.
Goh undertook the bulk of the oral archival work.
Among the National Archives deposits, some 85 interviews with content related to vernacular gardening were catalogued and transcribed. The team also interviewed 30 individuals – involved in HDB corridor gardens, kampong gardens, private housing gardens and community gardens – who “provide an unparalleled window into the socio-cultural significance of vernacular gardening in Singapore, especially with regards to the relationship between gardening and memory”, wrote Professor Williamson.
She considers this contribution to vernacular gardening’s thus-far light archival footprint here to be one of the beauties of this research project.
“Edible gardening is one of those things that kind of flies under the radar and actually, that’s partly the attraction of the project because it is a bottom-up initiative,” said Professor Williamson. “If you want to look at the history of formal gardening and greening of Singapore, there is a lot of documentation. But if you want to look at what ordinary people do, then it’s harder to do even though it surrounds us everywhere and all the time.”
In fact, she said, “despite Singapore being quite a controlled environment”, some people will, say, plant a fruit tree in the public walkway outside their home even though it is not strictly legal.
“It is like a way of asserting your own space within the urban environment,” she said. “It’s almost like there’s a very small undercurrent of guerilla gardening in Singapore, particularly among older people who’ll just create their own gardens and they may go undetected for a few years before they are told they have to stop.”
The need to preserve vernacular gardens
Having shown how edible vernacular gardens are intertwined with Singapore’s history, Professor Williamson’s report called for concerted preservation efforts.
It noted that although informal gardens are widely recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage, Singapore’s inventory currently does not have any other vernacular gardening practices listed in it except concerning Orchid Cultivation.
It recommended that the government take “concrete steps” to protect existing vernacular gardens, especially those that have been around for decades, from redevelopment: “This would not only further strengthen the sense of place and rootedness among ordinary Singaporeans but might also be a potentially important part of Singapore’s food security strategy.”
Allowing the older folk to cultivate the gardens uninterrupted enables them to pass down to the younger generation gardening techniques as well as plant cultivars, the report said. It added that gardening, being a physical activity, is akin to “incorporating practices of memory”.
Professor Williamson wrote: “While it is undoubtedly vital to collect oral histories from older gardeners, their memories cannot be effectively transmitted to the younger generation in decontextualized formats like websites or texts.”