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"It’s the perennial, as it were, dilemma of urban landscape architects everywhere.  How to create a grand, public park, with immediate impact, when the essential star attractions, the tall trees, can take decades or even longer to mature," states Sydney-based writer and friend, Anthony Dennis, in our most recent collaboration, 'The Ultimate Tree Change' published in The Australian's July 2012 issue of WISH Magazine.

Anthony continues, "It was this problem that confronted an impatient city-state with ambitions to cement itself as the pre-eminent tourism and investment destination in southeast Asia -- not in the future, but now.  Singapore, which in recent years has embraced architecture and design as drivers of its national goals, devised a unique solution to the slow-growing tree problem for its new Gardens by the Bay development.  It has built 'Supertrees' that form a sculptural garden, an amalgam of the architectural and the organic."

I had the privilege of visiting Gardens by the Bay for an exclusive private tour and photoshoot this past May, a number of weeks prior to the park's grand opening in late-June.  In Singapore's typical fashion of 'Go Big or Go Home', it was simply awe-inspiring.  The 18 'Supertrees' towered between 25m and 50m overhead, and

their branches extended "like oversized spiderwebs", the primary focal point being a 128m-long aerial walkway, which connects the giant man-made structures in 'Supertree Grove'.

As Anthony goes on to explain, urban design "has evolved to fully embrace a multitude of disciplines, not just the horticultural but also architecture and landscape design and, in the Singapore example, structural and environmental engineering.  Gardens by the Bay -- and, indeed, Singapore's entire Marina Bay development, including Marina Bay Sands, the Esplanade, Singapore Flyer, ArtScience Museum and Marina Bay Financial Centre -- certainly exemplifies this forward-looking philosophy.

See Anthony and my other recent WISH Magazine collaboration, 'Penang's Time Capsule', published in the The Australian's May 2012 issue.  And browse more of my luxury lifestyle and travel photography on my website.