Exotic Rice Cookery Demo Jan 7 2017

Here at Outreach, we are all foodies and we love cooking and sharing recipes, especially when we get to use local herbs in our recipes. So we have great news for all our cookery friends! Two of our members, Ambi and Parudah have agreed to demonstrate two different kinds of special and colourful rice recipes for the coming festive period.

(Suggested simple serving)

First up, Paruda will be demonstrating her much-loved Lemuni Rice. Made with the leaves of purple Lemuni or Lengundi (Vitex trifolia var Linn), Lemuni Rice is delicious with both simple nasi lemak-type ingredients or rich curries and sambals. 

The use of lemuni leaves in rice cookery is particularly well-known in the northern and eastern coastal states of Malaysia. The juice from the leaves are said to be good for various medicinal purposes. There is also a white variety, which is often eaten raw with simple sambal belacan or other condiments as ulam (Malaysian-style salad).

(Simple pilau rice)

Next, Ambi will show you how to cook a simple but very fragrant pilau (also spelt pilaf) to wow your relatives and friends during your festive feasts. 

A pilau is basically rice cooked in stock or broth with herbs, spices and some vegetables. It's great as a compliment to richer dishes but it's also lovely with dishes that have a strong taste profile like sambals. 

The demonstrations are open to everyone and will include a tasting session with herb tea made with herbs from our own Outreach garden.

Date : Saturday Jan 14 2017

Time : 10am - 12noon

Members - RM18.00 per person

Non-members - RM20.00 per person

Please book early to avoid disappointment as our cookery demonstrations and tasting sessions are usually very popular and places are limited.

Rainforest Walk (for Adults & Teenagers only)

Enjoy a cool adventurous walk through the rain forest and learn all about the secrets of the shrubs and other plants which live in, on and around the towering trees!

Click the picture below for a full-sized version of our brochure cover.

Please send an email if you need us to arrange for a special corporate group walk.

Kids Group Activities Available

Here's a complete list of Children's Group Activities and Price.

Small Ateliers Sat Nov 19 2016

Saturday, November the 19th, was a busy one for the Friends of the Botanic Gardens Society. The Small Ateliers community group had their Children’s Seed Safari with 19 children and 12 parents participating in the event. The intrepid adventurers were led on their nature walk by our president, Dr. Liew Kon Wui, with volunteer members bringing up the rear and helping to keep an eye on the excited children. The Small Ateliers made a little circuit of the outer section of the Botanical Gardens, looking at the different trees, their flower and seeds. They learnt a little about seed dispersal and when they got back to the Outreach premises, they had a little show-and-tell session.

Local vegetables and fruits of various kinds were cut open for them to examine, the highlight being the lipstick plant’s red juice which were used by the ladies of long ago to give their lips and cheeks a pink blush. Also known as the annatto, the hairy red fruits had many of the children thinking they were some kind of odd rambutan at first.

An art and craft session ended the kids’ day out, with the parents helping them to produce seed collages with local beans, peas and the specimens they had collected.

Glass Painting Class 3 Dec 2016

Saturday 19^th November marked our first Glass Painting lesson. The small group of students were taught to draw on drinking glasses and jars with black liner paste first, using different methods of transferring their designs before the liner paste was quick-dried using a hairdryer. 

The glasses were painted as soon as the liner paste had dried. A special transparent glass paint was provided for the students. At Outreach, our liner paste and glass paint has been tested with hot water and both will remain permanently on the glass, regardless of how many times the glass objects are washed with water and detergent. No scrubbing with a hard pad or wire, though!

After their first pieces were completed, the students were encouraged to try drawing freehand directly on to their extra glass pieces with the black lining paste and some of the results were rather impressive.

It really was quite as easy as it sounded. Once the students had got a bit of practice in hand, they were confident enough to draw not just freehand but without even having to refer to any sort of picture at all.

Glass-painting classes are suitable for kids aged 10 and above and will be ongoing at Outreach throughout the school holidays.

If you're interested to join us, p;ease don't hesitate to call or email us for a lesson.

Saturday Art & Craft Classes

Just to remind everyone with kids, our regular Art & Craft classes will be on as usual during this year-end school holiday! Here are some of the things we're teaching at -

Tadika Methodist Kids 17 Nov 2016

This Thursday was a busy one for the Society with 30 children from the Tadika Methodist coming over for the Seed Safari.

The cute little children split up into two groups when they arrived. One group followed our President, Dr. Liew Kon Wui for the nature walk, to learn all about how different plants make and send out their seeds to make new plants.

The kids collected plant and seed specimens to use when they returned to our Outreach office where they were given a short talk and given the chance to examine more kinds of seeds.

They were particularly fascinated by local plant like the annatto (the lipstick plant) which looked so much like rambutans, buah lokam which look so much like pink cherries, our local figs (sadly inedible) and some of the other plants and vegetables which grow in the Outreach garden. 

The other group stayed back at first, to learn to make seed collages with different kinds of seeds. The children were all very small, from 4 to 6 years old only, but they were serious about producing the best they could. That didn't stop them from having fun, however, and some very nice collages were produced for them to take home at 11 o'clock.

Glass Painting Classes

Come and learn Glass Painting with us this festive season and make your own beautiful glass lamps, wineglasses and jars! 

Have you ever looked at a Tiffany lamp or a picture of stained glass windows and wondered if you could do it yourself? Well, now you can!

At our Glass Painting class, we teach you how to draw on glass with liner paste and then how to paint on glass with transparent paint. You'll learn how to apply the liner to to make faux stained glass outlines before applying the special paint. We also teach you how to avoid common mistakes and the best way to display your finished piece.

You can bring along a glass item of your own (like a whiskey glass, a highball glass, a glass sugar jar or a glass rice bowl but not bigger than that as the liner takes  some time to dry properly before the paint can be applied to your piece) OR you can purchase a suitable glass item at our Outreach Office where we are holding the class.

Due to space constraints, classes are limited to a maximum of 7 participants only.

The first class will be on Saturday 26 November 2016 from 1.30pm to 3.00pm.

Charges are as follow -

Members – RM15.00 (bring your own glass) / RM20.00 (using our glass)

Non-members - RM18.00 (bring your own glass) / RM24.00 (using our glass)

Note – prices above are applicable for one glass item per person only.

Festive Season Glass Painting!

With the festive season fast approaching, our next project is Glass Painting! While we’re preparing festive gift items for our Garden Shop, we’re also looking into classes for those interested to learn so keep checking back or look for us at Facebook (botanika@gmail.com) for more updates.

There are actually two kinds of glass painting – transparent and opaque. Here’s a little bit about how we do transparent glass painting for those who are thinking of joining us. (Opaque glass painting will be covered in a separate post later.)

First of all, you need a clean glass – bowls, goblets, jars or glasses are all fine. You can use cut glass, too if you like. Wash your glass thoroughly to remove oil and dust. Wipe it clean with a dry cloth and set it aside for at least 10 minutes to make sure it’s thoroughly dry.

Then you can start outlining your design with a special black liner paste. This creates black outlines which give a stained glass effect like those in the picture, when done.

 Leave your outlined glass aside for a day or so to make sure the paste is completely dry when you are done outlining.

Now you can start filling in the outlines with transparent glass paint.

For more about transparent glass painting, our contact details are - 

Our First T-shirt Painting Lesson!

We had two sessions of t-shirt painting today in spite of the drizzle and some of our class members produced some really lovely art on their t-shirts.

Here's the start of a wisteria by our class member. As part of today's lesson, they also learned about mixing paint to get the shades they wanted. When you're working with commercial dyes and paints, blue and green doesn't always get you purple - at least not the shade you'd expect.

Part of the lesson was also about getting the painting medium to the right consistency to achieve a suitable Chinese watercolour effect on t-shirts and the kind of modified brushstrokes to get those particular effects.

Another member wanted to try painting on a dark coloured t-shirt instead. That meant a separate lesson using different media. The dyes we normally use for white or very light coloured t-shirts won't work on dark coloured t-shirts so it was exciting for the others to see what would happen. 

Judging from the chrysanthemum on the right, it was quite successful, don't you think?

A bonus was the dry-brush effect the student created when painting with a very different medium from our usual t-shirt paints.

Join us next week from 1.30pm to 3.00pm for another exciting and interesting session of t-shirt painting!

Paint Bags and T-shirts!

Learn how to paint on cotton Bags & T-shirts with waterproof silkscreen printing dyes on Saturday 22 October 2016! Your t-shirts and bags can be washed and re-washed many times without fear of the colours being washed out. 

Join us at our Outreach Office and learn to make some beautiful festive gifts that you'll be proud to give to your loved ones and which they'll love wearing or using. And just in time for the coming festive seasons, too!

Day/Time : Saturday 1.00pm to 2.30pm

Maximum No. of Participants : Maximum 6 persons

Price per person : RM15.00 (Members) / RM20.00 (Non-Members)

The following Terms and Conditions apply -

1. Participants must bring one WHITE or light-coloured T-shirt of their own.

2. Participants who wish to paint bags instead may bring their own white or light-coloured bag.

Note : Bags should be made of cotton or cotton-canvas.

3. Participants who wish to purchase our bags or T-shirts may do so at the following prices -

    White T-shirt : RM15.00 (Members) / RM18.00 (Non-members)

    Large Bag : RM15.00 (Members) / RM18.00 (Non-members)

    Small Bag : RM12.00 (Members) / RM15.00 (Non-members)

We'll provide the brushes and dyes for every lesson where you'll learn one-stroke painting to paint directly with the printing dyes. In four lessons we'll teach you all the basics for painting four different flowers and leaves.

And...if you're not confident about doing that by yourself, we'll provide a simple template with every lesson and teach you how to transfer the black and white drawing to your own T-shirts!

Lesson 1 : Madagascar Periwinkle

Lesson 2 : Japanese Rose

Lesson 3 : Helliconia

Lesson 4 : Blue Pea Flower (Bunga Telang)

The Langurs Project (Updated)

Those of us living in Penang have grown up with the fact that there are and hopefully, always will be monkeys at the Botanic Gardens. But few of us give our monkeys much thought other than as adorable curiosities to be shown to tourists or friends from other places. After all they are practically ubiquitous to the extant of being nuisances occasionally. What we don't realise is that it will take hard work to keep our beloved monkeys.

Members from The Friends of Botanic Gardens Society attended a talk in support of the Langurs Project given by Ms Joleen Yap at the Spice Gardens. The aim of the talk was to educate the public on the langurs of Penang Island. A graduate student of the USM, Ms Yap and her team under the supervision of Dr. Nadine Ruppert are studying the langurs in the Teluk Bahang, Botanic Gardens and Cerok Tok Kun Forest Reserves.

So what are langurs? For starters, they are not macaques, the more commonly seen denizens of the Gardens' trees, lawns and practically everywhere else they can beg or steal free food. This is a macaque.

This is a langur. Langurs are also monkeys. Members of the genus Trachypithecus, Penang's langurs are also known as Dusky Leaf Monkeys and are different from the Gray or Hanuman Langurs of India. Our langurs are very shy, much darker and have very sweet faces like this one seen at the Gardens. 

They are also classified as Near Threatened (IUCN 3.1) on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species* (see below) though our Penang langurs, cute as they might be, have not been properly studied before Ms Yap's academic research study.

The purpose of Ms Yap's study is to identify our local langurs' Diet, Activity Pattern and Habitat Use. Ms Yap's study is a primary base-line study and very important in determining conservation efforts. 

Ms Yap currently has a study grant from the Rufford Foundation but more local sponsorship and participation would certainly help to achieve the noble aim of her work. 

The Friends of the Botanic Gardens Society is supporting Ms Yap's efforts and we hope to hold a similar talk for our members and the public if there is sufficient interest.

Please indicate your interest by emailing your response to our email address at Botanika with the title: Langurs talk: OK. 

*The IUCN Red List or IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (sometimes just Red Data List) is the interntaional community's most comprehensive inventory of the conservation status of biological species world-wide. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the world's main authority in such matters and Regional Red Lists assess the risk of extinction of various species within each of those regions.

Printing On Coloured T-shirts

Learn how to print your own designs with beautiful leaves on black or coloured t-shirts! It's fun and it's a really useful way of recycling old t-shirts to make them new again.

From free-form designs to patterns, plant sprays and more, we teach you how to print long-lasting images on your own coloured t-shirts that will last through repeated washing. 

Day/Time : Saturday either 1.30pm - 3.00pm or 3.30pm - 5.00pm

Maximum no. of participants : 6 per session

Open to Members, Non-members and Children over 8 years of age

Price per participant :

Members : RM15.00 per person per lesson

Non-members : RM20.00 per person per lesson

The following Terms and Conditions apply -

1.Participants must bring ONE black or dark-coloured T-shirt of their own.
*Note : T-shirts MUST NOT be 100% cotton. 

2.Participants who do not have their own black T-shirts may buy one from us.

3.Participants who wish to do extra pieces may also buy one of our black T-shirts.

4.Members price for black T-shirts is RM15.00 per pc.

5.Non-members price for black T-shirts is RM18.00 per piece.

We'll provide suitable paint or dyes, brushes and palettes for participants, as well as lessons on how to make or form your own designs or patterns.

Food Testing Is Fun!

Over at the Friends of the Botanic Gardens Society Outreach office premises, we dearly love our tea and lunch breaks because sometimes our members kindly bring some of their latest culinary discoveries for taste-testing. Of course, it isn't always a formal "I'm bringing some goodies for you all to try out," kind of situation. Very often, a member will discover some new food stall or recipe and just bring some delicious titbits to share.

And it was during one of these tea breaks that the subject of salads and dips came up. With the different herbs we have growing in our garden, the main subject of conversation was using these aromatic plants in the easiest (and tastiest) of ways. Salad dressings and dips!

A bit of research tells us that apart from cooking it in soups or curries our neighbours up north, the Thais, use lemongrass as a salad dressing, too. A common combination is ginger, coriander (Americans call it cilantro), garlic, lime juice and chili. The Italians, on the other hand, favour oregano, basil and parsley with freshly ground black pepper and balsamico (balsamic vinegar)or white wine vinegar mostly whereas French dressing is much richer with yoghurt, and Dijon mustard added to the herbs. 

So naturally, everyone wanted to try making their own salad dressings and dips with the herbs from our garden. Some of our more conscientious members even went on-line to look for classic recipes to use as reference for their own experiments while the free-spirited ones simply winged it, but a lot of very delicious herb dips and salad dressings were discovered (and tasted!) We'll be collecting the easiest and quickest ones to share with everybody at one of our upcoming Saturday activity demonstrations, naturally.

Don't forget to like our Facebook page or check back here at our blog for more information, updates and announcements about our new activities!

*Tip - Look for Friends of the Botani Gardens Society at Facebook!