Welcome to Tropical Gardening
Welcome to Tropical Gardening, a website created for people who enjoy plants and gardening in warm, humid tropical climates.
Here, I hope to share practical gardening knowledge, simple explanations, and lessons I have learned through more than 10 years of growing plants in Malaysia.
Whether you are completely new to gardening or have been growing plants for many years, I hope this website can help you better understand your plants, solve common problems, and enjoy gardening a little more.
Why Tropical Gardening?
There is a lot of excellent gardening information available today, but much of it is written for gardeners living in temperate countries.
For those of us living in the tropics, conditions can be very different. We experience warm temperatures, high humidity, strong sunlight and frequent rainfall throughout much of the year.
Because of this, advice on watering, sunlight, soil, fertilising, planting seasons and general plant care may not always work in exactly the same way.
Tropical Gardening was created to look at gardening from this tropical perspective — not to replace existing gardening knowledge, but to understand how it may need to be adapted for the climate we actually garden in.
My Story
My name is Tan Ji, and I am from Malaysia.
I have been gardening for more than 10 years, although my interest in plants began much earlier. One of the people who inspired me most was my late mum, who loved gardening and helped introduce me to the enjoyment of growing and caring for plants.
Over the years, gardening gradually became one of my greatest interests. I spent a lot of time experimenting, reading, making mistakes, trying again, and learning from the plants themselves.
Professionally, I am also a lecturer teaching agriculture and food science courses, so I have always been interested in understanding not only how plants grow, but also the science behind them.
During my own gardening journey, especially in the early years, I often found that some gardening advice did not work quite as expected under Malaysian conditions. Much of the information I came across was written with temperate climates in mind.
That experience was one of the main reasons I decided to start Tropical Gardening.
I wanted to create a place where I could share what I have learned from both practical gardening and my academic background, particularly for people growing plants in tropical environments.
I certainly do not know everything, and I am still learning all the time. But I hope that by sharing what I have learned so far, this website can make the gardening journey a little easier and more enjoyable for others.
And in some small way, it is also a continuation of the love for gardening that my mum passed on to me.