🇹🇭 🌱 Seeds from a Thai Island 🌱 🇹🇭

Decompressing with plants, sea swims, and technicolour shirts...

Dec 01, 2025

An island wrapped in emerald green, where rubber trees weep latex tears,
The caladium leaves unfurl like art, their patterns grown through patient years.
The mangroves stand on stilted roots, where salt and fresh waters meet,
While chilli peppers dry like fire, beneath the island’s tropical heat.
A temple watches from the cliff, where cats wander wild and free,
And nature quietly reclaims the land, returning it back to the sea.

Technicolour Gandalf here (you should see some of the clothes I’ve picked up on my trip round Asia!), reporting (I was, I’m not back in the ‘refreshing’ climes of Europe but anyway, here we go hey) from a Thai island in the Trat region, which shall remain nameless! (Not to be all “if you know you know” about it but this island is really special. You can do your own digging to find out exactly which one this is anyway…)

I’ve been coming down from three weeks of partying with the kids. At my age, I need some time to decompress with my cohort and extended fam before heading back to reality. This mainly involves eating A LOT of simple but amazing Thai food, swimming in the sea, and trying hard to drag myself out running around the island in the crazy humidity.

Managed a 10k which I was pretty proud of myself for. Running in Thai humidity is absolutely no joke – it’s like running through warm soup while someone points a hairdryer at your face.

But there’s something about early morning island runs, when the light is still soft and the heat hasn’t fully kicked in yet, that makes it worth the suffering. Plus, you get to see the island waking up: fishing boats heading out, locals tending their gardens, and birds going absolutely mental in the trees.

Plus I’ve had my personal trainer in tow in a golf buggy drinking beer, shouting “cockadoodle Wil” at me whilst I run in my prized knock off Chanel top…

Plant Paradise

The beauty of Thailand – amongst many other great things – is that they LOVE their plants. And being on an island, you get to experience them in their natural habitat instead of in parks in an urban environment. This is plants doing their actual job, thriving in the wild, not being carefully curated for city dwellers.

I spent quite a lot of my time on the island photographing some of the amazing flora there.

Once you start looking, it’s absolutely everywhere – climbing up trees, bursting out of the ground, draping over walls, and generally just living their best tropical lives.

The Caladium Situation

The Caladium game in Thailand is STRONG. It’s where they originally come from and only recently has it been a bit easier to get them in Europe.

These are WILD plants. Heart-shaped leaves in combinations of pink, white, green, and red that look like someone’s been at them with watercolours. In temperate climates, you see them as expensive houseplants in fancy shops. Here, they’re just... growing. Everywhere. By the roadside, in gardens, under trees, absolutely thriving in the humidity.

The variety is insane. Some have almost pure white leaves with just a hint of green veining. Others are deep burgundy with pink splashes. There are ones with such intricate patterns you could stare at a single leaf for ages trying to work out how nature managed to pull off the combination. Check the one above, it looks a bit like an early video game graphics.

Seeing them in their natural environment, absolutely unbothered, really puts into perspective how much we baby them indoors. These plants want heat, humidity, and to be left alone to do their thing. Note taken.

Rubber Tree Revelations

Seeing rubber tree plantations in action and the way they harvest them was super interesting. The trees are tapped like maple trees for syrup, except instead of sweet sap you get latex. They make diagonal cuts in the bark and attach little collection cups that slowly fill with this white, milky substance. The trees are arranged in neat rows, all at exactly the same angle (check one of the photos below for them all leaning quite heavily, presumably from the wind), all with their little cups attached. It’s oddly beautiful in an industrial-nature kind of way.

The locals have been doing this for generations, and there’s a real art to it. Cut too deep and you damage the tree. Cut too shallow and you don’t get enough latex. The cuts have to be refreshed regularly as the tree heals itself, and each tree can be tapped for decades if treated properly.

Watching someone do this with the easy confidence of muscle memory was fascinating. They move through the plantation methodically, checking cups, making new cuts, and generally maintaining this relationship between human industry and plant biology that’s been going on for over a century.

The Cat Temple Situation

We also came across a cat temple out on a headland which is pretty odd... but amazing!

I’m not entirely sure of the full story behind it, but basically there’s this temple perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea, and it’s absolutely overrun with cats. Not in a neglected way – they’re clearly being fed and cared for – but in a “cats have taken over this sacred space and everyone’s just cool with it” kind of way.

The cats are everywhere. Sleeping on Buddha statues, lounging in the prayer halls, prowling around the gardens, and generally treating the place like their personal kingdom. Some are friendly and will come investigate if you sit down. Others are completely uninterested in human attention and are clearly just here for the free food and prime napping spots.

The temple itself is pretty, let’s say DIY and ‘out there’. There’s a google review which I must question though as being very unfair.
The location is incredible too, with views out over the ocean and coastal cliffs. You can see why the cats chose to set up here. They’ve got taste.

There’s something wonderfully Thai about the whole situation. The sacred and the everyday just coexisting without any sense that one diminishes the other. They’re just sharing space.

Nature Reclaiming Paradise

One day we took a boat out to an island where nature is taking back control of a hotel development which the locals managed to stop from going ahead.

This was properly wild. There’s these massive concrete structures, all very nearly finished – the skeletal remains of what would have been a resort – slowly being consumed by the jungle. Vines are crawling up the walls. Trees are growing through cracks in the foundations. Roots are breaking apart the concrete…

Abandoned island resort being reclaimed by nature...

It’s a strange kind of beautiful. On one hand, it’s technically ruins and decay. On the other hand, it’s nature demonstrating exactly how quickly it can reclaim space when humans step back. The jungle doesn’t care about your development plans. Give it a few years and it will absolutely dismantle whatever you’ve built.

The locals managed to stop the development, which is increasingly rare in areas seeing tourism pressure. There’s a real tension in these islands between development and preservation, between economic opportunity and maintaining what makes these places special in the first place. The main island though is owned by six families and they’re very strong in ensuring the island doesn’t get overrun or ruined by ‘capital’. It definitely feels like some utopia where they’ve just decided “this is enough, we’re all making enough and it’s fine the way it is thanks.”

Walking through the ruins felt like visiting a future where nature won. Everything was being slowly, patiently, inevitably pulled back into the forest. In a hundred years, you probably won’t even be able to tell there was ever a building here.

Trees That Live in the Sea

We also saw some great trees that grow in the sea. Mangroves!

These things are absolutely mad when you actually stop to think about them. They grow in salt water – which kills most plants – on these elaborate stilt roots that look like something out of a fantasy novel.

The roots arch up and down, creating these weird wooden cage structures that the trees sit on top of, lifting them above the water level.

They create entire ecosystems. The root systems become nurseries for fish and shellfish. Birds nest in the branches.

Crabs and mudskippers live in the mudflats between the roots. The whole thing is this incredibly complex web of life that only exists because these trees figured out how to thrive in conditions that would kill almost anything else.

Plus they protect coastlines from erosion and storms, filtering water and generally being environmental heroes. They’re not the flashiest trees – they’re kind of gnarly and twisted – but they’re doing serious work. Respect to the mangroves.

I was impressed by these ones…

Chilli Vibes

And some fiery chillies drying in the sun. 🌶️

There’s something hypnotic about seeing chilies laid out to dry – these brilliant red strings and clusters, sometimes spread on mats, sometimes hanging from lines, all slowly intensifying in the sun. The colours are absolutely insane – that particular shade of red that only ripe chilies and certain sunsets can achieve.

Thai chilies are no joke. Those tiny ones that look innocent? They will absolutely ruin your (my) day if you’re not prepared. The locals use them in everything, and watching people casually munch through dishes that would have me crying is always humbling.

Cookery School

Talking of chillis and cooking we did an amazing cookery course with this legend that is Leng and cooked some amazing food… We learned about Chillis there', there’s ‘tourist’ hot, then Thai mild, Thai normal and Thai REALLY HOT. Thankfully we toned it down for the class.

Made a new friend too:

Look at the view from the cookery school

The Tree Shirt

I also found an amazing tree shirt from the local market, perfect for BoG and Watching Trees next year.

Island markets are the best. This one had the usual tourist stuff, but also all the things locals actually need and in among all that, this absolute gem of a shirt covered in trees.

Can’t wait to wear it while staring at actual trees. Can you call this meta??

Cat Game

As I’ve already alluded to with the temple section the cat game was strong in real life too.

Island Flora Greatest Hits

Here are some more shots of the absolute diversity I came across...

The thing about island plants is they’ve often evolved in isolation, so you get these really specific adaptations and variations you don’t see on the mainland. Plus, the island microclimate – all that ocean humidity and salt air – creates particular growing conditions that certain plants absolutely thrive in.

I could have spent weeks just documenting the plant life. Every walk revealed something new – a flower I’d never seen before, a palm variety I didn’t know existed, or just a particularly stunning example of something common. The density of life in the tropics is overwhelming in the best possible way.

Listened to At Les a lot on the island for some reason:

and tried to unearth some other Thai-related abstract bits and pieces . These are kind of interesting…

Heading back to reality now, the island time was exactly what was needed. Three weeks of chaos followed by a week of plants, swimming, cat temples, and extremely good pad thai has restored the balance somewhat.

Thailand gets it. The plants, the food, the way they integrate nature into daily life, the unbothered cats living their best lives in temples, the locals fighting to protect their islands from overdevelopment – it all adds up to somewhere that understands what actually matters.

The fact that you can run 10k in humidity that would melt most people, then reward yourself with mango sticky rice and a swim in the ocean, while surrounded by plants that look like they’ve been photoshopped but are actually just thriving naturally - that’s a pretty good deal.

Massive respect to the island and its people for maintaining this particular kind of paradise. Also shout out to whoever makes those caladiums grow so perfectly, the person who tapped rubber trees with such precision, and obviously to all the temple cats living their best lives.