- Green Values: Flowers, Fruits, Plants and Vegetables in Thai Life
- Thai Secrets to Health and Beauty — The Natural Way
- Traditional Thai Herbal Healing
- Going Bananas
- Floral Arts and Crafts: Traditional and Contemporary
- Flora in Courtship and Romance
- Contemporary Western and Contemporary Thai
- Auspicious Plants and Trees in Rituals and Folk Belief
- Guide to Thai Fruits and Tropical Fruits
- Loi Krathong — Festival of Lights
- November 5, 2006
- THAI FLORA AND THAI WAYS
- Green Values: Flowers, Fruits, Plants and Vegetables in Thai Life

Flowers greet the visitor throughout Thailand. An orchid brooch from Thai Airways International. A welcome garland at your hotel. Fruit carved as blossoms on your plate. Petals in your spa bath. Another orchid on your pillow. Such bouquets are just the beginning. Plant culture is integral to Thai tradition and lifestyle.
MULTIPLE USES
Appearances are pivotal in this status-oriented society. Décor and display rely heavily on the beauty of living and cut plant arrangements, while the stylized foliated motifs of lai Thai patterns lend objects an inherent Thainess, as today’s designers demonstrate. Plants prove practical too, from remedies and wrappings to edible fruits, vegetables and flowers. But it is as an offering that nature’s bounty plays its keynote cultural role.

SACRED OFFERINGS
Traditional floral arrangements are not just decoration, but tribute, whether to Lord Buddha, spirits and Hindu gods, or to royalty, monks and seniors. The plants used often depend on the auspiciousness of their color, name, scent or meaning. Singers and dancers, too, receive the classic floral offering, the garland. Most kinds of garland include yellow carnation, red rose, and white jasmine, champee and crown flower, seen everywhere from shrine to taxi mirror.

The lotus, either budding or blooming, symbolizes Buddhism, hence its presence in altars and rites. Shaped like a lotus bud, the phum, a Buddhist and royal offering, is often composed from other flowers like the everlasting globe amaranth. In the north and north-east, ‘offering trees’ may employ delicate mountain blooms, cotton, orange and betel leaves and nuts. Historically, the betel-chewing set was a most prestigious offering.

MYSTICAL POWER
Certain revered leaves, roots, herbs and woods provide ingredients for amulets and potions. Many believe these bring protection or prosperity, attraction or luck. Some have morphed over time; the Beckoning Lady talisman seen at shop tills was originally carved from the root of a plant with a leaf that appeared to beckon.

LITERARY METAPHOR
Politely indirect in manners, Thais can use plant attributes when alluding to expression, especially in the arts. This floral language infuses scripture and poetry, which was originally inscribed on palm leaf books. Plant references get amplified through those tales' visualization into murals, crafts and dance, both in costume and choreography. Some songs describe women through floral euphemisms, and plants still provide pretty names for girls. Flowers and foliage can play plot-driving roles in epics like the Ramakien (Thai version of the Indian Ramayana), Inao and Khun Chang Khun Paen, a romance that records the extent of Thai plant culture.

PRACTICAL GARDENING
Even when Khun Chang Khun Paen was written centuries ago, Western formal landscaping, Chinese rock gardens and Japanese bonsai already influenced Thai gardening. Cross-cultural fusions abound in palace grounds, temple rockeries, parks and globular mai dut topiary. Indigenous Thai gardening has, by contrast, focused less on aesthetics than auspiciousness and practicality.

Surrounded by fields, orchards and canalscapes, Thais had enough human-sculpted scenery to green their vistas. So around family compounds, farmers grew trees for fruit and sugar, shelter and shade. These and other plants were grown at auspicious positions around the house.

Kitchen gardens provided vegetables and herbs to enhance the staple diet of rice, itself a plant generating a rich festive culture. Certain herbs — along with foraged jungle products — possess curative properties. Herbalism not only survived modern medicine, but remedies like prai root underpin Thailand’s burgeoning spas and much pharmaceutical research.

BEAUTIFICATION
Villagers also grew plants like turmeric for protecting the skin, aromatics like jasmine for perfume, and ingredients for natural dyes. Boiling petals, stamens, barks, woods and leaves produces a broad palette for coloring textiles, from indigo farmwear to a monk’s saffron robes.

Biodegradable products also wrap things, especially food. Many vendors still fold leaves of banana, lotus, pandanus or coconut into containers, fixed with bamboo pins or twine. Natural ‘designer’ wrappings extend to mulberry paper, leaf skeletons and pounded bark.

INGENUITY
Thais leave little to waste, especially with banana, coconut and bamboo. Banana flowers are a delicacy, the fruit a staple starch, and the leaves an umbrella or plate. Banana trunk plays punchbag to the boxer, its sections become floats for Loy Krathong festive offerings, and carved banana logs form a funerary plinth. Aside from its nourishing flesh and juice, coconut is prized for its hard, watertight shell, used in utensils, Décor, jewelry and, formerly, as the shield in a boxer’s shorts. Coconut fronds become thatched roofs, dessert moulds and woven decorations. Uses of bamboo encompass anything from cup and tool to raft and scaffold.

BUILDING & DECOR
Beyond using bamboo and wood, construction and furniture-making employ materials such as thatch from teak leaf or nipa palm. Rattan, water hyacinth and yan lipao vine get woven into chairs and contemporary Décor objects. In counterpoint, nostalgic urbanites socialize at venues decked in rustic assemblages of seed pods, creepers and seating made from roots.

FLORAL FLEXIBILITY
Seasonal flooding and mobile stilt housing led to potting plants for convenience. Modern Thais maintain the habit, as pavements lined with plant pots testify. Elaborating on the technique, compositions of massed potted blooms provide tremendous splashes of color, fragrance and living design to festivities and public space. They then get reconfigured for the next celebration.

Wherever you go, plants are a trademark Thai experience. That’s because they are an offering. Not just to the gods, but to you.

ROYAL FLORA RATCHAPHRUEK 2006
International Horticultural Exposition
for His Majesty the King
At the Royal Agricultural Research Center, Chiang Mai, Thailand