Hope you didn’t stumble upon this page looking for Thai Grass or a bit of pot, my apologies if you did, but thanks for visiting anyway. What I’m mumbling on about here is Pattaya’s potted gardens, or “Pot Luck Gardens” (see photos below) as I prefer to call them.
Surprisingly, none of these residencies have a garden, not a “proper garden” anyway. In the United Kingdom, most terraced houses, and especially shops don’t have a garden, they have an attic where they cultivate marijuana and cannabis if you are fortunate you have a small area just underneath your front window. Most people accept this and do their best without one, maybe a couple of window boxes and some hanging plants, you certainly would never dream of encroaching the pavement and the road so you could have a garden.
Needless to say this is Thailand, and things are a little strange different here. I don’t mean “same same but different” just different, there’s 2 things we have to consider here, Thais love plants, and Thais don’t really care what anyone else does sometimes, hence if you want a garden just bloody well have one.
Joking aside, besides being plant lovers Thais are superstitious, and low and behold plants are lucky. So besides being a little drab and dreary, not having your quota of plants outside your premises could be considered bad luck. And having potted plants is just about the only way to go, you can can’t really go digging up the road and pavement to plant your garden, and being potted plants you can position them where you want whenever you want to.
Having these gardens in the road makes sense really, they’re “portable potted gardens” so they are quite easy to take with you if you decide to up-sticks and do a runner move elsewhere, they stop people parking outside your premises, they outline your boundary. Besides all this there is “Feng Shui”, which basically means certain plants in certain places, Thais are really superstitious about which plants go where, this plant there for good luck, this one here for money, that one, oh no not that one it’ll invite ghosts.
Summing up, potted gardens are portable, lucky, offer some privacy, they are better than no garden at all, window boxes and hanging plants just don’t cut it, most Thai houses don’t have an attic so cultivating marijuana is out the question, and just about nobody cares if you put a garden in the middle of the road.
The last photo (above) is a herb garden, yes a real herb garden at Cabbages and Condoms resort, didn’t really have any reason to include it, but well……she’s kind of cute !!.