A Lombok garden

To beautify this beautiful world: The Javanese philosophy of memayu hayuning bawana loosely translates as ‘to beautify a beautiful world’. This is Sopantini’s heritage and her duty.

An Australian-Indonesian couple with a young family, in December 1999 we moved from Jakarta to the island of Lombok, east of Bali. The island is surrounded by warm seas; to the west is Lombok Strait and to the east, Alas Strait, to the north is the Java Sea, and to the south the Indian Ocean. In January 2001 we began acquiring land on what is now known as The Hill, or Bukit Batu Layar, on the coastal hills of West Lombok. In early 2008 we started designing our one-hectare garden, and building a traditional Javanese home and guesthouse, The Studio. In December 2009 we moved in. That story is detailed in Mark’s book, The Glass Islands, a year in Lombok (Heyward, 2023).

The Studio garden was envisaged as a healthy and attractive blend of ornamental and productive planting, a green refuge. When we began, there was no road, no water, no electricity. But, while the environment looked natural, as if plants had randomly self-seeded with no design, no intent, in fact the entire hill was, and is, a garden, a farm or a plantation. To those who know, among the weeds and saplings, most plants have a purpose; most trees have been planted by someone at some time with that purpose in mind. Our block is a small high valley, dissected by a seasonal creek, and with stunning views across Lombok Strait to Mount Agung on Bali. When we began, the block was already populated with large trees, shrubs, and coconut palms.

Our strategy was to leave the landscape as it is, in broad outline, to preserve the palms and large trees, and to enhance it by cutting and pruning, by creating open lawns, pathways and outdoor rooms, bordered by hedges, trees, changes in levels. The intention was to make the garden more productive and, at the same time, more beautiful. We set out to do this by adding fragrant frangipani, cempaka / magnolia, and kananga / magnolia, and by planting fruit trees: avocado, mango, mangosteen, rambutan, soursop, guava, jackfruit, and the Papuan matoa; and a modest grove of citrus: potent little dark-green limes, sweet mandarins, and huge grapefruit-like pomelo, known as jeruk Bali. Existing fruit trees included tamarind, jackfruit, coconut, and wild mangos.

The plan was simple enough. It mainly involved leaving everything where it was, the large fruiting duwet / Java plum trees that lined the borders above and below, the huge fig tree with its dangling aerial roots, the buttressed rainforest giants that cluster along the creek, the tall coconut palms, the sugar palm that we tapped for palm wine and red sugar, the towering stands of bamboo, and the row of deciduous banten (Lannea coromandelica) that marked the western border. Rather than designing a landscape, it was more a matter of filling in the details – a traditional statue here, a lawn and a bank of ferns here, a hedge of miniature bamboo there, a flowering frangipani, or a fruit tree or two over there.

We decided on a very plain colour scheme for the garden. Avoiding the wild tropical colours, the shocking pinks and purples, the flaming reds and oranges – and sticking to a simple palate of whites and pale creams as occasional highlights in the green – creates a cool, calm and peaceful effect. Visits to the botanical gardens of Singapore, Bali and West Java provided inspiration. The English landscape traditions of Capability Brown and his eighteenth-century friends translate well into the tropical gardens and parks of Singapore and Malaysia, creating an equatorial idyll that contrasts with the more common Dutch-influenced gardens of Indonesia, with their trimmed hedges, geometric designs and lagging maintenance, a seemingly futile attempt to impose order on South-East Asia’s unruly natural environment.

Although, at this stage, our soil is getting richer with organic matter, much of it from its own trees and our own chicken and cow dung, we still face challenges.  Protecting the fruit from monkey attacks is a continuing struggle. A troupe of around one-hundred macaques has taken up residence in the valley. Occasionally a python or a monitor lizard raids the chicken pen or the fish dam. Our complex water system, which includes bore water, harvested rainwater, and recycled wastewater (using a natural reedbed system) requires constant maintenance. The garden requires constant attention, cutting and pruning as the fast-growing tropical vines left alone will smother trees and eventually kill them. Occasional earthquakes threaten to damage infrastructure, and big rain events sometimes cause landslips. This year, the long dry season stressed some of the plants, but our garden survived well.