A plant breeder behind some of the world’s best cultivars | Indonesia Special | Gardening Australia

The name Aglaonema is not so well known in Australia, but in Indonesia, the genus of plants is so popular it has its own theme song. Tammy and guest presenter Sean Salim, ‪@onlyplants‬ visit plant breeders Mia and Greg Hambali to see the wide range of Aglaonemas they are growing. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe

Greg Hambali is well known in plant circles for producing some of the world’s best-loved cultivars, but of all the plants he has worked with, the Aglaonemas are the heroes in his greenhouse. He has bred about 100 hybrids.

His daughter Mia learnt the ropes from her father at his Bogor nursery and now runs her own nursery in Bali.

Mia shows Sean some of the behind-the-scenes tricks of the trade – using a paintbrush to move pollen from one parent plant to another – and explains the patience needed to wait for results: sometimes up to eight months for seeds and then even longer for the hybrid plants to grow before you can select the best plant from all the thousands of ‘babies’.

Greg shows Tammy some of the many cultivars he has created. Tammy is used to seeing these plants in shades of green, but here there are pinks and reds in a whole range of combinations. It is the colourful plants that are most popular, especially the red ones, because in Indonesia red is associated with bravery and luck.

The main parent that brings these red tones to hybrids is Aglaonema rotundum, from the island of Sumatra. Greg compares this plant to salt in the kitchen – “without it all the dishes are bland”.

Because each individual hybrid is different there is always an incentive to keep trying to see what the next combination will bring.

Mia shows a huge pile of boxes filled with labels of hybrids that have been deemed a ‘failure’ – not different or interesting enough to propagate. She says her father has produced more than 10,000 ‘failures’ in his lifetime. “I’ve already made more than 1,000 failures and I intend to make any more before I achieve success,” says Mia. “A failure is not the end of the world. We keep doing what we’re doing and we never give up.”

Behind the nursery is a huge experimental garden. It’s more like a personal jungle than a garden, with something new at every turn.

Sean finds a Paradise Palm similar to one that he killed by underwatering - he says it should never dry out and likes acidic soil and bright shade.

Tammy finds a Philodendron ‘Java Beauty’ with leaves almost as big as her!

For decades Greg has been working on breeding Salak – a palm with a sweet firm fruit that’s an important food in south-east Asia. It’s also known as snake fruit because of the pattern on the fruit’s hard outer skin. The skin is peeled off, like a rambutan, revealing a white, soft fruit inside with three segments, each with a pip in the middle. Tammy is surprised to taste both sour and sweet at the same time.

Greg aims to breed a fruit with even better flavour – and on a palm with fewer large spikes on the stems, so it is more gardener-friendly!

Rest in peace:
Gardening Australia expresses great sympathy for the family of Greg Hambali, the incredible plantsman, fondly regarded as the Father of Indonesian Aglonema, who died a few months after filming this segment, on November 4, 2023.

He will be deeply missed by his family and plant lovers in Indonesia and around the world.

Featured plants:
Aglaonema cv.
Aglaonema rotundum
Paradise palm (Licuala mattanensis)
Philodendron ‘Java Beauty’ syn. Thaumatophyllum cv.
Salak (Salacca zalacca)

Filmed in Bogor, West Java
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