WHILE most people would take the greenery in their garden and around them for granted, James Wong gets excited.
He sees instead nature’s resources.
He shares his enthusiasm for vegetation through his own BBC TV series, the popular Grow Your Own Drugs (also known as Backyard Medicine), which explores the use of plants to create natural remedies for everyday ailments. “It’s a contemporary take on modern medicine in home remedies,” says Wong in a phone interview from London where he has been based for the past 10 years.
Wong is quick to point out that he’s not a herbalist, who would specialise in only one culture and one plant.
As an ethnobotanist, he is a scientist who studies how people use plants.
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Some of the remedies on his show are Malaysian-inspired, like the insect repellent spray made from lemongrass. Another is a family recipe called long-life chicken soup with shiitake mushrooms to boost the immune system when one feels under the weather.
Wong recalls his curiosity and natural affinity towards plants and their intrinsic properties going way back to his childhood. “My grandmothers from both sides of my family were crazy about plants and I was nurtured in this environment,” says Wong, the child of a Foochow Malaysian father from Sarikei, Sarawak and an English mother.
Raised in Malaysia and Singapore, his passion would eventually lead him to travel the world in search of new plants and their fascinating uses. A graduate of the University of Bath, he then trained at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the University of Kent, gaining a Master of Science degree in Ethnobotany. “During my university days I used to grow various plants in a row of little pots and I’d use a whisk or blender to make all sorts of things in my little kitchen,” says the ethnobotanist, who is in his late-twenties. He relates that in London, the world is practically at one’s doorstep as it is home to many ethnic groups, which brings about diversity in remedies and easy availability of natural ingredients. Wong notes, curiously, that there are many
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