For award winning landscape designer Lim In Cheong, gardens go beyond the decorative and carry a sustainable message.
In tropical Malaysia, where the flora is always lush and abundant, it’s easy to take this bounty for granted and forget that our natural landscape can be designed and nurtured to have a significant impact on our wellbeing and quality of life. This is where landscape designers come in; they transform private homes and commercial developments into urban oases and help define a community with public spaces like parks, streetscapes and plazas.
One such person is Lim In Cheong (better known as Inch) who has spent his career creating soulful gardens and landscapes that are so cleverly designed that they look completely effortless. It is a talent which has made him a highly sought-after designer in SouthEast Asia and a multiple award winner in international competitions such as the Gardening World Cup for three years in a row.
Inch was born in a small town in Johor called Batu Pahat, in the front room of a pre-war shop house, shortly before Malaysia’s independence where a mangrove lined river with muddy water ran through the town which was then one of the bigger ports of Malaya, with its own barter trade zone.
“Nature held an enormous fascination for me, and I spent a lot of my childhood chasing dragonflies, catching crabs along the river, and fishing in little streams. I suspect that this is the childhood of many people of my generation,” he reminisces.
At 16, he left Batu Pahat and enrolled in the United College of South East Asia in Singapore which Inch believes forced a more global perspective on the impressionable teenager. From there, he went on to university in Canada and returned to Malaysia in his twenties after having worked and visited in as many countries as he could enroute.
He started his practice, Inchscape, more than 20 years ago with just him doing very small projects although as his reputation became established, this steadily grew and today Inchscape handles much bigger projects which has caused the practice to increase substantially in size. Thus far, Inchscpape has been involved in many types of projects running the gamut from a bear sanctuary to public gardens, from residential developments to government related consultancy for shoreline management in countries which include Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.
“I enjoy doing a variety of projects because it keeps the practice fresh. Each type of project involves a different set of challenges. Since I like challenges and problem solving, I find that all of them are enriching in one way or another. If there is a common thread to my gardens it is that it is built for people. Crazy as it may sound, we designers sometimes get so caught up in our designs that we forget that it is people we are designing for,” he muses. “I don’t really have a favourite project. Every time I think that one is my favourite, I end up liking another just as much. My designs are part of me. They are part of my psyche, part of my mental space, part of my curated memory that I project into real space. I suppose that is what every designer does. So we all are capable of a special project, we just need to dig deep into ourselves.”
Indeed for Inch, landscaping is not just about creating a pleasant natural environment. He believes the work should have an element of sustainability as well. “What appeals to me about this field is the fact that you can change the environment hopefully for the better. While landscape design in Malaysia has become quite mainstream, what needs to change is the attitude that landscape is mainly a decorative addition to a building. It is a lot more than that. It has to do with everything from mental health to sustainability,” he states emphatically.
However he also agrees that the mindset has somewhat changed since he started in this field and that is of the willingness of clients to invest in good landscape design: “I think that there is a fairly new interest in creating landscape and a new value placed on it. Companies and individuals are willing to spend much larger sums of money to create gardens and landscapes. This gives the industry more opportunities to indulge in experimentation.”
While working on projects tends to come with its own set of requirements and limitations, Inch pushes the boundaries by continuing to compete in various landscaping competitions. Most recently, he won Best of Show and the Gold and Horticulture Excellence Awards in the competitive Landscape Gardens category at the Singapore Garden Festival (SGF) 2018 with an entry entitled “The Wild And The Restless”.
“Usually the concept comes fairly quickly to my mind but takes about a year to develop. For the 2018 Singapore garden, I had designed an entirely different garden but that proved too expensive to build so I ended up building “The Wild and the Restless” which uses a palette of wild and naturalised plants, that have colonised the open areas of tropical Asia. In a way, it is an idealised version of the South-East Asian countryside using woven bamboo to create the hard landscape. The garden is meant to point to the beautiful things that surround us that we often ignore because we are desensitised,” he explains.
Working out from his tranquil, wonderfully landscaped office in a row of retro houses on Jalan Sin Chew Kee, it’s easy to see how Inch continues to remain inspired. Being a landscape designer seems to be a calling for which he was born for and he continues to pursue this with great passion and joy. “I have some really exciting projects that I am currently working on, some in exotic places. I hope I continue to do cutting edge designs and stay healthy and active.”
As for his ideal garden? “The Japanese, for example, spend many decades to perfect the art of gardening which has resulted in many magnificent gardens. I have spent many hours admiring them. However, the English gardens are just as beautiful, but in a very different way. I think there is a certain danger of adopting a particular typology as one’s favourite as it may lead us to ignore the rest. So I would say I haven’t got one but many favourites which I know is a contradiction in terms.”
Much like the free-spirited Inch himself, his choices resist definition.
