Shajan Velaeden is an optometrist by day and “plant daddy” by night. Living in the Melbourne CBD there’s few opportunities for having a garden but Shajan bought his apartment for the unusually large courtyard. Inside and out is full of beautiful plant collections from highly prized aroids to unusual caudex and succulent plants. It’s a calming green haven to come home to after a busy of day at work.
“When you enter you just get this whiff of fresh air, of plants, the room smell is actually sort of relaxing. I say hi to the plants every morning and evening, they’re sort of like your little babies, and so each time when you come home you see the new growth or new bloom you get excited.”
Shajan grew up in Singapore with his identical twin brother and two sisters. “I was born to mixed parentage, my dad’s Indian my mum’s Chinese so we always had a very interesting of both the Indian and the Chinese side of the family… Mum loves orchids, she has a whole collection of orchids and I remember growing up she had this whole row of plants that she would grow and she would get us to water the plants when she gets to work. That’s probably where [my interest] stems from.”
Inside his home is a vertical wall full of anthuriums, philodendrons and orchids, favourite plants that he can look at every day such as the dark purple Anthurium luxurians x papillilaminum or the long, leathery leaves of Anthurium veitchii x ‘Red Beauty’. The structure is a 1000kg load bearing garage shelf. “You want to invest in something that lasts a long while. And because all the plants have a water reservoir they are pretty heavy.” The extra humidity can also lead to rust, so he made sure the steel was powder coated too.
There’s also a paludarium – “a mini ecosystem where it has its own climate. Majority of the plants used in here are carnivorous plants because they are quite small, they don’t grow big, minimal maintenance is required.” It’s also full of mini orchids, begonias, ferns, and mosses loving the tropical environment created by the pool of water and heat from a grow light.
Shajan’s courtyard is home to a large succulent and cacti collection to make the most of the sun and fresh air. Some of his favourites include the Medusa’s head euphorbia and the Mexican boulder (Beaucarnea hookeri syn. Calibanus hookeri) – “it has a nice, beautiful caudex below, like a soccer ball, part of it gets buried underground. But what’s so beautiful about it is this long, wiry, blue-green leaves” adding lots of texture and a different colour to the collection.
The courtyard also has a glasshouse for “ugly beautiful” succulents and caudex plants. “The more gnarly, knobby, arrow shaped they are the more I see the beauty in them. I like things that are just oddly shaped and the more oddly shaped they are the more beautiful to me.”
“It gives you that rewarding and satisfying vision every day that you come back [home]. The wall is actually alive, it’s changing every day, makes you transcend to another world.”
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