Our First Colour Garden

On the rooftop of an industrial building

Hello colourful folks! Hope everyone is keeping cool in this hotness lately.

We thought of sharing about the space which got us started with Wild Dot back in 2020. We had the intentions to find somewhere that had a small garden space, and of course a studio that allowed us to do our experiments.

Back then, we were just experimenting in our own homes, which often led to protests from our families (imagine explaining how we are cooking liquids with unusual smells with plants picked off the roadsides).

Rooftop from Tinkertank

One of the spaces we recce-ed was a neat little co-working space called TinkerTank, tucked away in an industrial area of Aljunied. If you’ve ever passed by a humongous elevator hanging outside a knocked down wall, yup, that was the iconic building we saw!

One of the things we enjoyed about the space was the vibrant community of woodworkers, bike mechanics, henna tattoo artists in the space. Co-incidentally, just before we got in, someone started dismantling a sand garden on the rooftop of the building. When we saw the planter beds there and had the landlord’s permission to restart the beds, we knew that was the space for us.

Sure they needed loads of work, but we were excited to just get started back then.

Original garden where the farmer was doing sand farming

They looked like they have been left alone for quite some time

The farmer left us with three planter beds, and lots of sugarcane. And a bamboo that became a key member of the space!

And so, the deciding factor became the rooftop garden space! And this was what we did with them!

Our first garden on the roof with just three planter beds! After much labouring under the heat of trying to grow on the rooftop.

The plants that helped us get started with colours in this climate: Mango (yellows), henna (red-brown), suji (green), cosmos (yellow - orange), blue pea (blue, green, pink)

We had only three planter beds, but it was more than enough for us.Working alongside a garden felt akin to having another member in the team. We felt happy when there was great harvest, and also regretful for neglecting some plants when our other work got busy. Some plants also died due to mysterious fungal diseases that came from nowhere and wiped out our Magenta plants.

Our beautiful little cramped studio with a leaking roof, but lots of ideas were brewed here.

Wall of pigment papers and tests. Some of these are still at our current studio!

Makeshift drying rack for drying henna leaves

Starting and maintaining a garden, no matter big or small, is no easy work. But we like the idea of thinking of our garden as a constant “work-in-progress”. There’s no perfection point, and there will always be plants growing and plants dying.

I hope you enjoyed this sharing! Please do consider sharing this with other folks who might too :)