About
Veera Sekaran
The Plant Whisperer
Greening Tomorrow With the Help of Technology
Forget about having just green thumbs, Veera Sekaran is Singapore’s veritable plant whisperer.
With 30,000 square metres of landscape projects worldwide under his belt totalling a few thousand projects, including 350 projects in Singapore, this master of vertical gardening played a crucial role in establishing Singapore as a garden city.
Armed with faith, resilience and passion, Sekaran managed to climb to the top of his game, but his path to success was not an easy one. The fifth of nine children, Sekaran grew up in poverty, raised by his mother after his father died from an illness when he was just aged five.
Despite initially struggling at school, without a school bag or stationery, Sekaran managed to put himself through university, after realising early on that he had a big interest in nature, and science. That interest ignited a lifelong passion that became a business.
“Nature has taught me the value of resilience,” he says. “Every time I face a challenge in life, I always look at the plants and think about how resilient they can be – and that people can be just as tenacious.”
Sekaran’s guiding principle in life has always been that hard work pays off and that shortcuts don’t exist.
“The resilience of surviving all these challenges has made me stronger,” he continues. “If anything knocked me down, I would get up quickly and just carry on.”
Green Passion
Sekaran started his urban landscaping company Greenology during the Global Asian Financial Crisis in 2008, and endured going without a salary for more than two years.
“I persevered because I had faith in the resilience of Singapore’s system and economy,” he says.
Singapore was basically the “ideal place” to start Greenology, says Sekaran,
Given Singapore’s limited land mass and vertical urbanised landscape. “The city is literally vertical and greenery can become a challenge in such a built-up city,” he continues. Vertical gardens are therefore especially important because they maximise the use of space so “people don’t feel the compact crowdedness that we have,” he muses.
With Singapore’s Government taking the lead to create a city in a lush garden in the 1980s, Sekaran dreamt about catalysing change and “professionalizing” the local landscape industry. This meant creating a full supply chain with local talent at every step from nurseries to landscape technicians and architects.
Not only did this mean starting training programs at different educational institutions, but also using a simple method of rebranding jobs and renaming job functions to correctly describe different specialisations.
Events such as the International Green Building Conference and Singapore Garden Festival also helped to “develop the local industry and showcase to the world what Singapore can do”. Personally, Sekaran has managed to forge many global partnerships through these events, particularly in Australia and across Southeast Asia.
Future-Proofing The Garden City
Singapore has set out a plan for the city-state to be the “world’s first Smart Nation” by 2025. And akin with this ambition, Sekaran also envisions building a smart green city not just in terms of energy, but a breathing interaction between the outdoors and indoors, using innovation, creativity and lots of technology.
“Living within very dense spaces, the greenery becomes an important part of how you connect with nature,” shares Sekaran “Every time you go to a park, there is psychological relief,”
But Sekaran explains that with technological advances, the boundaries of outside versus inside are upended as greenery can be cultivated indoors, at home or at work, “to become part of your living experience”.
By using artificial lighting and sensors to test temperature, humidity and soil pH levels, these give a better grasp of plants’ general well-being. And for the 2 million or more trees that line the streets of Singapore1 drones can be used to help with upkeep. Through predictive maintenance, these technologies can also help cut costs of cultivating green spaces.
“I call it the Internet of Trees,” he says. “I’m developing something called the Green Intelligence Network that allows people to communicate with the greenery that they put in.”
Greening The World
Currently, Sekaran is developing the world’s largest indoor farm, which will feature robotics, sensors and autonomous vehicles.
To Sekaran, Singapore’s “greening infrastructure is one of the best in the world” and the country’s advantage lies in how “we’ve made it so flexible, so efficient and where everything works.”
“The alchemy of our diversity is the secret of our existence in Singapore,” says Sekaran. “The diversity that we have here allows lots of different people and nationalities to meet and generate ideas. Everyone who comes here for conferences, learns so much from what we have achieved.”
Singapore ranked second in the world’s top cities for urban greenery with almost 30% covered by canopy, according to a report by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SenseLab and the World Economic Forum.2
Hence, it is no wonder that Sekaran says that many want to duplicate Singapore’s urban greenery success. Thankfully Sekaran does not limit his dreams to just the island. It’s “not just about greening Singapore,” says Sekaran. “It’s about greening the world.”
1https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/environment/caring-for-2-million-trees-no-easy-feat
2https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/the-12-cities-with-the-most-trees-around-the-world
