Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One day in 2000, Leonard Ng realised that banking was not his calling. Fifteen years as a proprietary trader at Singapore-based United Overseas Bank seemed more than enough. “There’s a shelf life to trading,” he says. “There’s really nothing much to show for your effort except the plus and minus of an accounts book.”He looked around for inspiration. He had enjoyed spending time with an architect while commissioning a property in his native Singapore, and kept thinking of the Canadian prairies, where he had spent time as an undergraduate in Saskatchewan. A combination of nature and design felt alluring. So he changed tack and qualified as a landscape architect, taking courses at night while working at the bank. “One day I was head of the prop desk for bonds training, and literally the next day I was an intern at the National Parks Board.”The garden is grass-free. Ng cultivated a drought-tolerant local weed, and repurposed it into a resemblance of a lawnThe transition was tough, but his commitment paid off. Last year Ng was named Singapore’s President’s Design Award “designer of the year” — having previously won four “design of the year” titles. Collectively they recognise 16 years of involvement in making Singapore become a garden city, one of the greenest in the world.It’s no surprise then, that we meet in the garden of Ng’s home, a light-filled two-storey house designed by local architects RT+Q, in Singapore’s Leedon Estate, a hilly pocket of luxury gated houses. There is a deliberate lack of order to his garden: “I wanted to feel like you’re in a natural forest,” he says. “There are no straight lines here. The leaf litter is left on the ground and the trees are unevenly spread.” The garden is multi-layered, just like a rainforest: Borneo Kauri, Malayan Crape Myrtle and Umbrella trees create a canopy, epiphytes grow from the boughs at mid-level and Chinese Fan Palms dot the ground.Partly, this is a practical matter: “I wanted it to be a self-sustaining low-maintenance landscape. Being a landscape architect, I’m kind of picky, but I don’t really have a lot of time.”Ng points out that the garden is grass-free — remarkably, this award-winning landscape specialist doesn’t own a lawnmower — and instead Ng has harvested and cultivated a tough and drought-tolerant local weed, and repurposed it into a resemblance of a lawn, flowing like a waterfall over a step.The house itself is custom-designed to combine two dwellings, one for himself and his wife and three daughters (15, 17 and 19), and one for his in-laws, separated by a central lift. Everything is open, with nature invited in: the big open-plan kitchen flows directly to the front garden in one direction and a pool area in the other. Hornbills are frequent visitors; so too are squirrels, who have a habit of stealing their fruit. The garden seems like an extra room, intrinsic to the home. A heavy wooden dining table is as curved as the garden, shaped to keep the natural characteristics of the tree it came from. A corridor is repurposed as a sort of unhidden shed; tools and a chainsaw hanging in neat order on the wall.Ng has a passion for collecting antique searchlights sourced from old warships, admiring “the combination of industrial aesthetics, function of communication and illumination . . . and the history”. They stand in corners of rooms, adding to the industrial feel. His in-laws’ collection of life-sized bronze figures from the Qin and Han dynasties, by Chinese artist Cai Zhisong, also populate the house, reclining by a spiral staircase, standing like sentries near the entrance. Upstairs, in his home office, past a large master bedroom with a wooden ceiling fan more often seen in Singapore’s older, colonial-era homes, another passion is indulged: minerals and crystals, an interest Ng shares with one of his daughters. The crystals bloom from small boxes on shelves. Smaller plants thrive here under the attention of photographic lights of sufficient sophistication to impress the FT’s photographer. Ng works beneath a road sign saying Frankel Walk, a memory of his previous home on Singapore’s east coast; his family bought it in an auction when the signs were renewed.As we wander through the house, Ng’s attention constantly turns to the plants within and around it. On the roof of the home gym, by the swimming pool, Ng points out hanging plants meshed into fabric on the roof; they reduce heat and the need for air conditioning. By the pool are Australian weeping tea trees, and in a separate Japanese-style garden area in his in-laws’ wing of the home, koi carp drift in a pond angled (by Ng) to create a sense of lengthened perspective. There are Swamp Sheoaks (casuarina glaucas — playfully known as Cousin Itt for their resemblance to the Addams Family character) draped on the ground like a carpet. Herbs grow in pots. Ng can name every plant in its Latin form; if we go that way, I tell him, the story is going to require quite the fact check.A series of pools leads visitors to the entrance and garden. This feels right, because from the very outset, water has characterised Ng’s approach to landscape design.Singapore has a close relationship with water, and not just because it is an island nation. As one of his first acts as leader, founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew elevated water to a national security issue; he recalled only too well the British surrender of Singapore in February 1942, forced, more than anything else, by the fact that the Japanese army had taken the reservoirs. “In most countries, water is a need, not national security,” Ng says. “But for us, it’s existential.”“It’s not like we have a large hinterland where we can collect water and supply ourselves. If there’s not enough water on the island, we are beholden to someone else.”Singapore has the best drainage in south-east Asia, to avoid floods when the tropical rains fall, and sophisticated mechanisms to ensure water supply. But to Ng, there is a greater possibility in water. Collecting water is only part of the challenge, he says. “Next we need to make sure [that] water becomes cleaner. And you do that by trying to change people’s mindset and their relationship with water.”Ng first trialled this while working on the Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park project, his first assignment for the German landscaping firm Atelier Dreiseitl — later known as Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl — after joining in 2008 (the firm was rebranded Henning Larsen in 2023, where Ng is country market director). This was a pilot initiative to combine rainfall collection, recycling, and the animation of public spaces. “And then hopefully the public will engage with these spaces, build a sense of ownership, and be less inclined to pollute the water source,” Ng says. That means cleaner water, less energy for recycling, “and it all comes together. It’s really not about designing the river so much as it is redesigning our relationship with water.” This is particularly fitting in Singapore, he says, “where every square metre of land is really valuable to us. We cannot afford to have mono-functional uses.” A canal, say, cannot be just for drainage, but also supply and recreation. “So instead of having one function, now there’s three functions. That’s why we design in layers.”Bishan was, and remains, enormously important to Ng. “When I’m out in Bishan park and see people playing and laughing and having a good time, chasing the butterflies and really appreciating it, that really validates the effort.”This thinking is visible in many of his later projects: the water play areas at Jurong Lake Garden; the multipurpose model of the Kampung Admiralty building, where the community is bonded through a multi-tiered roof garden filled with local plants. It will be central to his next major assignment, creating mixed-use shared spaces above a 21.5km tunnel network called the North-South Corridor.All of these principles are clear in Ng’s home: the interplay of physical structures and nature, the idea that a house and the gardens around it are one and the same. There is a symbiosis here: his work as a landscape architect informs the place he lives, and his home in turn informs his work.“This is my sanctuary,” Ng says. “After a day of stress you come back and you feel energised. You go out to the greenery and you get inspired to come up with new ideas.”And those ideas are informed by the plants around him. “Nature is inherently beautiful,” he says. “Nature doesn’t require design, and the best we can do is learn from it. But even if we can only produce a poor facsimile of nature, how do we do that in an authentic and faithful manner? That’s what I strive to do as a designer.”Chris Wright is a contributing reporter for the FT, SingaporeSingapore Design Week runs from September 26 to October 6 Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
