wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  Channel NewsAsia 15 Jul 06
Pitched green roof at renovated part of Botanic Gardens
By Joanne Leow, Channel NewsAsia

Channel NewsAsia 11 Jul 06
Botanic Gardens fully opens it doors to visitors after four years
 By Noor Mohd Aziz, Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE : Singapore's flagship park, the Botanic Gardens, will be open to the public this weekend. The "soft opening" will coincide with the opening of a food court named "Taman Serasi Food Garden."

After four years of renovations, the Singapore Botanic Gardens will be fully opened to the public. Extensive construction and landscaping works have been carried out, and pavilions, libraries and landscaped gardens have been added to the Botanic Gardens.

People coming to the gardens will still see some works in progress, but it will be safe for the public to visit.

"This represents the final step in the rejuvenation process of botanic gardens and it contains the heart and soul of the botanic gardens. This is where our reference collections are, namely our library, the herbarium, and some of our living plant collections will be centred around here. This is the Centre of Botany for our Botanic Gardens. We are in the process of bringing in the wide diversity of tropical plants that we can find in the region to enliven this landscape here," said Dr Tan Wee Kiat, advisor at NParks.

The beautifully landscaped gardens give the impression that the buildings are sprouting out of the garden, and there are also rooftop gardens.

And what is a walk in the park without food in the stomach? "We've always had a F&B (corner) in the garden. But now we've staged F&B in three different levels. We have fine dining, mid-level dining and now we are going to have a food garden. It's basically a food court - the new version of the Taman Serasi Food Court," said Dr Wee.

Boasting 11,500 square feet of space for 350 people, the new food court's owners hope to recreate the variety and ambience of its old namesake. "The new Taman Serasi Food Garden will open on July 15. It is going to be the new and improved version of the old Taman Serasi Hawker Centre. We're located at the same place, just across Cluny Road. We are keeping the flavour of the old food centre and we're going to try and improve it. We've got some very good tenants in as well," said businessman Jack Poon.

The food centre will open this Saturday (July 15) while the Singapore Botanic Gardens official opening ceremony will be at a later date. - CNA /ls

Channel NewsAsia 15 Jul 06
Pitched green roof at renovated part of Botanic Gardens
By Joanne Leow, Channel NewsAsia

Visitors to the Singapore Botanic Gardens will be able to enjoy a host of new facilities as its renovated Tanglin Core reopens to the public.

Tanglin Core will have a pitched green roof - Singapore's first - that showcases hardy plants like ferns and orchids. A pilot project, the roof is part of NPark's efforts to use new technology to promote skyrise greenery. Other high-tech facilities at the Tanglin Core include an orchid breeding and micropropagation lab.

But a sense of history is also important in the Botanic Gardens. It has a library of 30,000 books and journals dating from 1875. And its Herbarium, a plant museum that houses over two centuries of accumulated knowledge and plant collections, has attracted international scientists. There are some 650,000 herbarium specimens at the museum, the oldest from 1790. - CNA/ir
links
Related articles on Singapore: recreation and Singapore: green buildings
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com