BAIDA JANE HERCUS
President of Free Tree Society, 38, born in Sabah, raised in Perth, Australia.
I WAS BORN in Sabah, grew up in Kuala Lumpur for awhile, and then moved back and forth between Australia and Malaysia. I’m a funny Malaysian, I’m a funny Malay, I’m a funny white hippy Malay. My family lives here, my mom, my dad and my brother too. When I finished university and got married, we moved to Kuala Lumpur to be with my family.
I’VE ALWAYS been fascinated by plants and growing things. When you drive around Kuala Lumpur, you know, you got the messy road system and the pot-holes and the absent sidewalks. You think people could be doing so much more with the green area outside their houses and growing things outside their house. Tropical plants grow so quickly and yet people prefer to concrete their gardens and concrete outside their houses because they think plants are dirty. So gardening in Malaysia has been decreasing, people have been forgetting the skills of their grandparents, and the qualities of the local herbs that you get, in our environment, plants grow so quickly. So to me, starting up a gardening culture and giving away plants and encouraging more people to keep up planting and don’t forget these skills is important. I’ve wanted to do this since I was a teenager, and started this Free Tree Society in 2012. It’s been a fabulous experience, meeting a lot of people, explaining things, I’ve got a lot of students that comes here, and it’s wonderful to interact with them.
ONE EXPERIENCE I’d like to erase, this is one pet peeve of mine, is the construction of houses without proper permits. From my bedroom window, I had a beautiful view of the green hills of Bangsar. My neighbour decided, instead of a 3-story house, to build a 5-story house which is illegal. He blocked my view, and I’m upset because that’s my daily view, gone. I see his toilet too.
WHAT I DON’T LIKE about KL is the recurrent haze problem, which is also something you know when it comes around, you think, should I move? But hopefully that problem will soon come to an end.
COMPARING KL when i was a child, there was much less traffic and definitely safer. I could walk as a teenager with my friends, walk down the street and go to the shops and all. Unlike now, there’s snatch-theft and that huge population, people you don’t know. I would never allow my children to walk down the street to the shops.
I’M NOT your typical Malaysian when you look at me, I’m a white Malay, and I love plants and have a sustainable house, I harvest rainwater and I grow vegetables, so I’m not what people would perceive as your normal KL-ite and yet I have so many Malaysian friends who are just like me. In a city the size of KL, you can find people like you, it’s big enough and diverse enough that you’re not a sore tongue sticking out, no matter how strange you might be.
I JUST LOVE the social life in KL, being able to go out anytime and sit with friends and chit-chat, you know, you can always find someone who’s free. So it’s a very sociable city, people always want to holiday together, and take trips, and go makan, yeah, you’re never lonely! Maybe there are too many people sometimes; it’s too hard to get away. I find KL sometimes exhausting, you want to plan a little bit of me-time but that just never happens, you’ve got to really switch your phones off and hide yourself if you want to get away otherwise people want to meet up, people want to contact you.
MY BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT is creating a Free Tree Society, just the realization that I was able to do it quite quickly and the feedback’s has been positive and meeting new people through it and people who want to help, it’s wonderful to get that dream realized here, in Kuala Lumpur.