eTawau > Organisations — NGO > 1StopBorneo Wildlife > The Fig Garden
#Plant4Tawau — 1StopBorneo Wildlife, with Sime Darby Plantation, Sabah Parks and the Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre
On 19 March 2021 fifty fig trees went into the ground on a strip of plantation land directly opposite Tawau Hills Park, about a hundred metres from the park headquarters. It was a small beginning to a large idea: to plant a corridor of fig trees that would let wildlife move again between Tawau Hills Park and the forest of Bukit Gemok, which has been cut off from it by agriculture.
This page is a dated record of that project, kept on eTawau because it is happening in the Tawau district and because it will take decades. It is added to as news comes in.
The garden sits on the margin of an oil palm estate belonging to Sime Darby Plantation, immediately across the road from Tawau Hills Park and about 100 metres from the park headquarters, facing the untouched forest. Published accounts describe the site both as a buffer zone within the plantation and as old oil palm land; both are true of the same strip, which is the plantation's edge where it meets the park.
The old oil palms were not cleared. They were left standing to be used as host trees for the strangling figs — the young fig is placed on the palm and grows down around it, which is how a strangler fig starts life in a forest anyway. It is a neat piece of economy: the crop that replaced the forest becomes the scaffold for its replacement.
Four purposes are given in the published accounts, and they are worth separating because they are genuinely different things:
The choice of tree is the whole point of the project, not a detail of it.
Figs are a keystone group. Ripe figs can be found in a Bornean forest at any time of year, which means they carry fruit-eating animals through the months when nothing else is fruiting. One published account puts it flatly: all fruit-eating animals in Borneo eat figs — orangutans, monkeys, gibbons, civets, fruit bats and dozens of bird species including the hornbills. And because the animals that come for the figs are carrying the seeds of everything else they have eaten, a fig tree standing in bare ground becomes a place where hundreds of other plant species arrive by themselves. Planting figs is a way of getting the forest to plant the rest of itself.
Borneo has about 160 wild fig species. The first Tawau planting used 16 of them.
Named in the published account of 19 March 2021: Ficus cucurbitina, F. benjamina, F. annulata, F. drupacea, F. francisci, F. gul, F. microcarpa, F. racemosa, F. rosulata, F. septica, F. tinctoria subsp. gibbosa, F. subcordata, and — from the launch reporting — F. villosa. The published lists do not add up to a full sixteen between them; the remainder are not named in the sources available here.
| Body | Role as reported |
|---|---|
| 1StopBorneo Wildlife | The conservation NGO driving the project. Sabah-based; funds its conservation work through wildlife tourism. Founder Shavez Cheema. |
| Sime Darby Plantation | Owner of the land the garden stands on, and partner in the planting. Estate manager Tahir Ismail named at the launch. |
| Sabah Parks | The park authority; partner. Deputy Director Rimi Repin launched the October 2024 planting. |
| Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre (SFGC) | Supplies fig planting stock and holds the seed bank. Based at Tabin. Recognised in 2020; holds over 1,000 plants of 87 Ficus species across three one-hectare sites, banks seed from 45 species at −82 °C, and produces about 1,000 seedlings and cuttings a month, given free to land managers. Hassan Sani named. |
| Lions Clubs of Tawau | Sponsored trees, transport and signboards for the October 2024 planting. |
Worth setting out carefully, because the money reaches Tawau by more than one route and the routes are often blurred together.
No published source seen here describes an international NGO funding the Tawau garden directly. If that is not the whole picture, the correction belongs on this page.
Newest first. Each entry gives its source.
A planting day at Tawau Hills Park put in more than 1,200 trees and flowers. It was launched by Rimi Repin, Deputy Director of Sabah Parks, and attended by over 50 representatives from schools, plantations, government agencies and NGOs. The Lions Clubs of Tawau sponsored some of the trees, the transport and the signboards. The stated aim was to turn degraded land into wildlife habitat.
Source: Daily Express (Sabah), 13 October 2024.
Yulinda Wahyuni of 1StopBorneo Wildlife handed seed of the rare Ficus albipila to Hassan Sani of the Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre — the traffic running the other way for once, from the garden back to the seed bank. The published account of this exchange also sets out the wider plan: saplings raised monthly at the SFGC nursery at Tabin, planted as corridors so that elephants and orangutans can move between protected forests.
Source: The Figs of Borneo (borneoficus.info), 3 September 2022.
The launch was reported as a joint project of Sime Darby Plantation and 1StopBorneo Wildlife, intended to link Tawau Hills, Bukit Gemok and other smaller parks in the district for the benefit of hornbills, gibbons and langurs. Present at the soft launch: Tahir Ismail (Sime Darby estate manager), Sukkur (Head of Bomba Tawau) and Shavez Cheema (1StopBorneo Wildlife). The stated timeframe was fifty years, and the garden was also to serve as a gene bank for fig research and a teaching site for restoration practice.
Source: Borneo Post, 24 March 2021.
50 fig trees of 16 species planted on the plantation edge opposite the park, about 100 m from headquarters. Old oil palms left standing as host trees for the stranglers. Sponsors and partners named: Sime Darby Plantations, Sabah Parks, the Sabah Ficus Germplasm Centre and 1StopBorneo Wildlife.
Source: The Figs of Borneo (borneoficus.info), 19 March 2021.
There is one thing eTawau can add to this story that nobody else can, and it is worth saying plainly because the opportunity is closing.
Every photograph taken on that strip before March 2021 is a baseline. A restoration project can measure what it plants, but it cannot go back and record what was living on the ground beforehand. Two records on this site were made on that exact strip on a single afternoon — 4 September 2015, six years before the first fig went in:
Two ant genera out of one half-kilometre of plantation edge in an hour and a half, before any of this began. If more frames from that afternoon are in the archive, they belong here too.
Compiled by Wong Fook Yee for eTawau.com from the published sources listed above. Page created 10 September 2026; last revised 10 September 2026. This is a living page and is added to as news arrives.