Our very own ‘Flower King’ Leon Kluge has once again picked up two awards, this time at the Singapore Garden Festival!
Singapore (06 July 2026) – South Africa’s internationally recognised landscape designer, artist, and botanist Leon Kluge and his team have landed back-to-back honours at the Singapore Garden Festival (SGF)!
At the world’s biggest tropical flower and garden show, Kluge has walked away with a Diamond Award and the Best Planting Award for their tropical garden installation called ‘Dreamer’s Retreat’.
The wins came as part of SGF’s milestone 10th edition, held at Gardens by the Bay, which this year brought together eight past ‘Best of Show’ winners from around the world for a special ‘Show Gardens: All-Stars Edition’ showdown.
Kluge shared the Diamond Award with fellow international designers Emily & Mark Cook (USA) and Eliam Eng & Andy Eng (Singapore), while the Best Planting Award, handed out for showcasing horticultural know-how and top-quality plant material, went to Kluge alone.
Kluge says the diamond-winning garden was created to bring a moment of calm in one of the world’s busiest cities.
“A Dreamer’s Retreat is a place where you can feel calm and creative, between the hustle and bustle of this big city of Singapore,” he explains.
The garden is built around two main features – the planting itself, and a bamboo studio structure modelled on rolling hills and the streams and waterfalls that wind between them.
True to the tropical theme of the festival, bananas and bamboo are two stand-out plants in the installation. A pond sits at the centre of it, fed by little waterfalls and dotted with water lilies and blooming lotus flowers. Bamboo forms a backdrop behind the water, doubling up as structure for the whole garden, which includes a floating pathway that skims across the pond and leads right up to the studio.
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Cape Town Kayakers Rescue Starving African Penguin Far Out to SeaThe studio is a work of art made from bamboo ‘shingles’ – bamboo stems that have been crushed, spit open and plaited onto an undulating frame. Inside, pot plants and banana-leaf murals create a relaxed, inspiring space.
It’s yet another feather in the cap for Kluge, who earlier this year led Team SA to gold and Best Exhibit at RHS Chelsea with ‘Life After Fire’. Our Flower King has shown the world that South African green fingers are hard to beat!
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