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<strong>gardens</strong>: thailand T he garden at the e Jim Thompson House in Bangkok is a welcome refuge from the noise and bustle of one of Asia’s most dynamic and fast-changing g cities. It is the ideal place to go the day after arrival, to sooth jetlagged nerves and make a gentle cultural transition, its traditional-style buildings and lushly planted garden a complete contrast with the modern city. Jim Thompson (1906-1967) was one of many Americans who went to Thailand during or after the Second World War and stayed, finding that this very traditional and ordered society had a tolerant, open and welcoming side. Coming from a family of textile manufacturers, he had practised as an architect in the US, and had a love of historic and traditional buildings. In Thailand, Thompson became a silk entrepreneur. He saw that what was once a major craft industry was being undermined by imports of cheap artificial and factorymade textiles. Using his contacts on the American East Coast, he began to export traditionally made silk and encourage 42 the english garden February 2013 GARDEN NOTES Tranquil half-acre jungle in the centre of Bangkok cottage production, commissioning weavers to produce new designs using reliable synthetic dyes. He is credited with raising thousands of families out of poverty largely through women breadwinners, while his profits were ploughed into buying Thai antiques and artworks, and running a lively social life. The house, with its increasingly important art collection, became an Flowers are relatively few - tropical gardening is overwhelmingly about foliage ABOVE A variety of palms shade the central courtyard of the Jim Thompson House complex. Lower-growing foliage plants benefit from their shade. BELOW Heliconias and tree ferns form a layer of intermediate foliage between the tree layer and the ground layer. important location in the life of both expatriates and well-connected Thais. In the 1950s, it was an unusual decision for either a foreigner or a member of the Thai elite to want to live in a traditional house. Thompson however, loved the spare, elegant building style of his adopted country and recognised how the design of the buildings made the most of shade and breeze to keep cool. Using materials salvaged from six old houses, he completed the house in 1959, and then laid out a garden on the surrounding land. A letter to his sister Elinor sets out his desire for a lawn, somewhere to display a growing collection of Thai sculpture and ‘jungle’. It says much for Thompson’s sensitivity to place that the lawn idea was soon abandoned and instead the ‘jungle’ concept dominated. It being the tropics, plants grew rapidly, and were soon joined by tree seedlings. By the 1990s, it was clear that a major overhaul was necessary. This was overseen by Bill Warren, another long-term American resident of Bangkok, who had been a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University for 30 years, and the author of many books about Thai and southeast-Asian art, culture and garden-making. ‘I can say that when we first replanted it, no effort was made to exactly reproduce Jim’s creation,’ he recalls, ‘since so many new species had appeared on the market in the meantime. We were just trying to capture the same feeling it had in Jim’s day, that is, a sort of urban jungle that would surround the Thai houses but still
TAKE IT OR LEAF IT The Jim Thompson House garden shows the wonderful effects that can be created with different colours, textures, forms and shapes of foliage, layered from the ground to the canopy above. English gardeners can create a similar look with plants such as hostas, ferns, hardy bananas and bergenias. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Dieffenbachia ‘Parachute’; heliconia bracts dangling down; shining white ribs on an alocasia; dark foliage of a spathiphyllum plant; the intriguing marked leaf of an arum; Polyscias balfouriana; Aspidistra elatior; Dieffenbachia ‘Camille’.
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Page 5 and 6: Gthe english ARDEN FOR EVERYONE WHO
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