Is There Language and an Internet Among Trees? Uncovering the Rules of Love, Struggle and Upbringing

Text / Gene Ng

In 2017 the International Society of Developmental Biologists conference was held in Singapore, and the conference banquet took place in the "Flower Dome" at Gardens by the Bay. Singapore is a city-state, and to show off its national strength it reclaimed land and built Gardens by the Bay, along with two enormous plant conservatories - "Flower Dome" and "Cloud Forest" - each occupying about one hectare, fitted with a huge glass roof that requires no additional internal support (such as columns), as well as a cooling system that connects to the "Super Tree" grove and collects rainwater through its glass surfaces. It is very unusual.

In the past the Western powers built botanical gardens and glasshouses to cultivate tropical plants from their colonies, and these two modern conservatories are remarkably similar in approach. The sixteen-story-tall Super Tree grove can both disperse the hot air in circulation and cool the water in circulation; Singapore's national flower, the orchid, is planted on it, and there is a skyway where visitors can pay to walk up, take photos and check in, with a light show at night. These tourist attractions charge foreign visitors fees far higher than those for their own citizens, using the money to invest in even more ambitious tourism projects, unlike some politicians in Taiwan who only frantically throw money around to fool voters into building one mosquito pavilion after another, with no follow-up funding or plans for operation, leaving them to rot - the Tsai Ing-wen government's southward policy should be able to learn something here, just as the Super Tree grove learns from the trees in the forest.