Someone was leaving me flowers, and I never once caught them doing it.
✦
Every day, a fresh orchid appeared on my bathroom counter, replaced sometime between when I left my room in the morning and when I returned at night. It was a tiny detail that hinted at a great deal of unseen work, repeated in room after room across Marina Bay Sands’ three towers. All to keep a little bit of nature present in the urban experience.
✦
Singapore’s greenery was very much on my mind when I arrived in the city in August. Weeks earlier, I’d come across a social media post joking that “Singapore loves carving out random floors in buildings to add trees”.
I scrolled through the replies, half-amused, until one user pointed out that this was not simply a design choice but actual policy. Since 2009, the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s LUSH (Landscaping for Urban Spaces and High-Rises) programme has required new developments to replace the greenery they displace with sky terraces, vertical gardens or rooftop plots.
All photos: Cindy Julia Tobing
Greenery by design
At Marina Bay Sands – the landmark that has redefined Singapore’s skyline since 2010 – I was interested to see how that played out. And once I started looking, I found it everywhere: the royal palms lining the waterfront promenade; the trees crowding the 57th-floor SkyPark; the bougainvilleas planted in neat rows along the room balconies; the delicate waterlily pond outside the ArtScience Museum.
Even the resort’s bonsai collection has its own backstage room tucked among the resort’s guest rooms. Thirty-six smaller trees are tended there, while another 16, some weighing up to 800kg, sit in the Paiza Collection lobby. This affinity for nature also carries into the refurbished rooms and suites of Paiza Collection, the resort’s most exclusive suite offering, where motifs inspired by Singapore’s flora and fauna sit alongside local craft influences.
“For Marina Bay Sands, and Singapore, the common observation is that nature does not sit apart from the built environment,” Jordan Loh, Marina Bay Sands’ horticulturist and tree surgeon, told me.
His role itself is a specialised kind of work that requires both a close eye and a longer view, where he might spend hours pruning a single bonsai or personally sourcing plants for the resort’s spaces, anticipating how each will grow and settle within the hotel’s built environment.
While scale and context differ, the underlying philosophy is the same: “Nature should be part of the urban experience, rather than something people have to leave the city to find.”
That thinking predates any building. In 1963, then–Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew planted a tree at Farrer Circus to launch a nationwide tree-planting campaign. Four years later, he set out his vision of Singapore as a Garden City. Today, the government’s stated ambition is a City in Nature – an idea that has shaped buildings across the island, from gardens within office towers in the Central Business District, to rooftop vegetable plots in hospitals and malls.
✦
The scale of the work that sustains this became clearer when I visited Marina Bay Sands’ back-of-house operations, an underground network of corridors and workspaces where more than 100 departments operate away from the guest-facing floors. I met the Bay Floral team led by manager Oo Mar Mar, working out of a cooled room where fresh blooms are stored before they make their way around the property.
The team’s role spans refreshing in-room floral arrangements and building festive installations to handling one-off requests for anniversaries and birthdays – including, on one occasion, 1,001 stalks of red roses for a guest’s significant other.
“Fresh flowers bring softness, colour, texture and life to a space. More importantly, they show guests that someone has thought carefully about how the room should feel when they enter it,” said Mar Mar.
When arrangements are taken down, the team sorts through every bloom to salvage usable foliage for small displays or other purposes. Managing waste starts long before an arrangement is even built.
“The objective is to plan carefully, order only what we need, and care for the flowers properly to extend their useful life.”
Working with nature
In the hotel atrium, I found myself wondering about ‘Rising Forest’, visual artist Zheng Chongbin’s towering ceramic vases filled with mature trees, and the logistics of transporting these 1,200kg vessels into the building and planting trees inside them.
While the installation had presence, it wasn’t imposing, and it shaped the space the way good lighting does, softening the sunlit atrium with the canopies and dappled light.
The Rising Forest’s trees are among the 900 that Jordan and his team look after. Some are brought in from other countries and can take up to three months to acclimatise to Singapore’s tropical climate.
“The starting point is to understand that plants grow according to their own rhythms, even when everything around them moves quickly,” said Jordan.
In a busy hospitality setting, that also means thinking carefully about where each plant belongs. “We take precise measurements and consider how a plant’s eventual form and scale will relate to the architecture, guest movement and surrounding landscape,” he explained.
✦
There is a certain paradox here: modern approaches are being used to work with the wisdom of nature. While the hotel sleeps, staff scale ladders to check the Rising Forest trees branch by branch for pests and fungi. They also monitor the trees in the Sands’ Skypark, where a sensor on certain trunks streams real-time data on each tree’s structural health.
The more I saw of the operation, the more I understood that nothing is merely for show. Every tree, bloom and sensor speaks to a bigger picture.
Some of it is visible if you know where to look: the glass roof of The Shoppes, for example, draws in enough natural light to reduce the property’s lighting energy consumption. On the facade of Tower 3, ‘Wind Arbour’, an installation by environmental artist Ned Kahn, exemplifies the resort’s integration of art, nature and architecture through its 260,000 aluminium flaps that shimmer and ripple with the wind, shielding the hotel atrium from direct sunlight.
But most of it is tucked out of sight, like the more than 100,000 sensors that monitor energy, water use and air quality, or the collection of condensate recovered from air-conditioning units in the hotel towers that’s used to irrigate the surrounding landscape.
Seen this way, the resort encapsulates the city around it. Singapore is often admired for its forward-thinking systems – its planning rules, recycled water, green building standards – but the greenery that anchors all this is a reminder that those systems run on people: the arborists who check trunks for disease, the florists who swap out an orchid before you return to your room.
Just like the city, behind the polished landscapes of Marina Bay Sands is an invisible rhythm of people tending, pruning and making sure things continue to grow.
