BY ADAM MORTIMER, TEHC INTERNATIONAL
In 1967, then Singapore Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew stated his vision of Singapore as a garden city. The city would be full of lush greenery and a clean environment for the citizens to enjoy and an attractive country for tourists and foreign investments.
50 years on from this early vision, Singapore is known for being a global financial centre and a gateway where the east meets the west. It is one of the most densely populated countries on earth with a world-renowned airport transiting passengers around the globe. It has also been described as a ‘City within a garden’.
The ‘City within a garden’ mantra is fully visible before even leaving Changi Airport with manicured landscape displays within the terminals capped off with the critically acclaimed Jewel Changi Airport. The Jewel is a multi-dimension destination housing retail, restaurants, and the world’s largest indoor waterfall known as the rain vortex surrounded by six stories of stunning greenery.
TEHC International is one of Singapore’s oldest and largest landscaping companies with a proud history of 40 years of transforming landscapes in Singapore.
TEHC International PTE LTD is one of Singapore’s premier landscape contractors and is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the Jewel Changi Airport. The scope of the project was quite intimidating with a vision of what’s typically found outdoors in a natural setting and recreated in an enclosed indoor environment. Covering 21,000sqm, 2000 trees including palm trees, 100,000 shrubs comprising 120 different species originating from countries including Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Spain and the USA. All of the plants had to be imported to an off-site nursery in Singapore and acclimatized for a duration of two years before being planted into the Jewel project under TEHC’s watchful eye.
Mr Dick Toh, Managing Director of TEHC International and eldest son of company founder Mr Toh Eng Hock, has been at the helm of the company since 1990 and is credited for taking the small family-run business that started in 1971, to one of Singapore’s most trusted partners consistently delivering the highest quality workmanship on often difficult projects that most people would shy away from.
TEHC’s contribution to the Singapore landscape is very much on public display at the Jewel at Changi Airport, or his work at the National Stadium maintaining the Zeon Zoysia lay and play pitch and the construction work on the golf courses hosting international events, to highlight a few. Mr Toh often jokes it is his ‘national service’ to be involved with some of Singapore’s most iconic venues.
1999 TEHC got their first golf course renovation project at the highly acclaimed Sentosa Golf Club, Serapong Course. The flow-on effect from this first project has been significant with at least 15 major golf course renovation projects completed within Singapore and completed projects in Taiwan, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Over the last 20 years, the turf industry has evolved and the demands of golfers and clients continue to grow. Most notably the development of new grass varieties has been something we have witnessed first-hand. In the early 2000s, there was a surge in golf courses using paspalum sp. For greens, tees and fairways. That trend is slowly starting to decline as more Zoysia grasses are released onto the market and are more suited to our tropical climate. Our most recent renovation project on the 27-hole layout of The New Course at Singapore Island Country Club, designed by Graham Marsh, was planted with ‘Zeon Zoysia’ for tees, fairways and rough and ‘Primo’ Zoysia for the greens surfaces, being a first for Singapore.
Singapore is located close to the equator with an average yearly rainfall of 2,200mm. The rainfall combined with the heat and humidity and low-level sunlight makes growing high-quality fine turfgrasses a challenge. We have found with the new Zoysia grasses they are more adaptable to low-level light conditions and more resistant to major disease and insect outbreaks while maintaining an attractive green colour. Having a more resilient turf enables us to produce higher quality playing surfaces more consistently throughout the unpredictable weather patterns with reduced inputs.
TEHC has approximately 400 staff with around 130 of them dedicated to the turf maintenance division servicing three golf course maintenance projects, the National Stadium pitch and small production turf farms. We pride ourselves on having a modern greenkeeping approach to our turf maintenance. We have internally implemented a surface data performance template that we use for all our playing surfaces. Collecting hardness, moisture %, NDVI values, green speed and visual characteristics data sets we can create bespoke maintenance programs for our clients and ensure we are maintaining certain standards. All three courses are using different grasses, paspalum ‘Sea Isle 2000’, ‘TifEagle’ Bermuda and ‘Primo’ Zoysia that all require different maintenance that the performance data collection process can guide our Superintendents on the decision- making process to produce the desired playing surfaces.
Mr Toh freely admits that he needs to be a pioneer in order to create some of the visions clients have so they can become a reality. It takes some out-of-the-box thinking to make things happen. You take the Jewel project where we imported 600-year-old olive trees from Spain. Acclimatize in a controlled environment for two years then hoist them six stories in a massive dome to the final positioning within a landscape and expect the tree to grow happily. There is no textbook that will tell you how to do it.
It is the same for the National Stadium, where we transport approximately 650 rolls of ‘Zeon’ Zoysia turf from the nursery location. We roll them out into the dome of the stadium where we need them seamless, matching colour and growth within a two- week period to host major sporting events. Post-event we roll them back up and send them back to the nursery location to prepare again for the next usage. Mr Toh explains that what we do may be a little unconventional, but we have to make use of as much technology and forward-thinking as possible to deliver the final visions of our clients.
Over the years TEHC has strategically aligned itself with several subsidiary companies with distributorship rights for Singapore including leading products such as John Deere, Syngenta, Floratine and Hunter Irrigation. On the landscape side, we have specific subsidiaries that cater for everything from the design phases all the way to implementation and maintenance. We also have a fully equipped sand plant importing and producing specific sand or soil mixes to cater for all our projects. With this group of subsidiary companies, we can access the latest technological advancements in each specific industry and be a one-stop solution for our clients on even the most challenging projects.
TEHC International can be contacted at [email protected]
