1. Man is born to apprecaitae beautiful things, be it rural or mountain landscape, old but delipidated buildings, beautiful flowers, slim or large cars, gigantic animals etc. It is second nature for man to like and love beautiful things even though as some people declared beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To me beauty is beauty.
2. Man loves to decorate his dwellings with beautiful landscape hence he planted and cultivated plants of all kinds of habit around him. He likes the aromatic smell of Cananga odorata or Michelia champaca; he likes the bracts of Bougainvillea glabra or Mussaenda philippica; he likes the ringed stems of Veitchia merrillii or Roytonea oleracea; he likes the petals of Hibiscur rosa-sinensis or Plumeria obtusa, etc
3. Hence he imported many more foreign plants which are supposed to be more exotic and put in the nurseries throughout the country. When the government agencies more plants to plant and when the housewives more herbs and shrubs to decorate their dwellings and building they buy from these nurseries.
4. Then the problem started as the local taxonomists like me have a lot of difficulties in identifying the foreign plants to species. At the most I could get to the family level period and to get to the genus and what more species took a lot of pain referring to the unavailable books. In Thailand and Singapore my counter-parts have less problems as the reference books are plenty. In addition, many exotic plant species came to Malaysia via Thailand.
5. Taxonomy is beautiful if you could impress the public with binomial nomenclature but when you are stuck with foreign plant species you were more like a fool. These plant species didn't come through the immigration channels for passport registration like we do. How nice if these species were to line up in the immigration channels with their passport in their branches where we can register their species names and origin, and sometimes their sex too, monoecious or dioecious or polygamous.
6. Malaysia needs more reference books with beautifully illustrated pictures of the ornamental plant resources.
2 comments:
Salam Prof.
Saya sangat bersetuju dengan pandangan Prof. di dalam artikel di atas. 'Industri' tumbuhan hiasan adalah sangat penting pada masa kini kerana mendapat sambutan banyak pihak dan potensinya yang masih luas dalam bidang landskap. Tetapi, pengecaman spesies tumbuhan hiasan (terutamanya tumbuhan eksotik) masih menjadi suatu masalah di kalangan ahli botani dan ahli landskap, apatah lagi orang awam. Ini ditambah pula dengan kewujudan pelbagai kultivar bagi sesuatu spesies tumbuhan hiasan. Antara buku di Malaysia yang boleh dirujuk ialah 'Tropical Horticulture and Gardening' (Dr. Francis Ng), 'Bunga-bungaan Malaysia' dan 'Palma pilihan untuk seni taman' (Ismail Saidin). Saya juga sering merujuk buku '1001 Garden Plants in Singapore'.
boleh prof saya buat phD pasal ornamental flowers in Malaysia
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