Courtesy of Rio Helmi

At nine o’clock on Tuesday morning in Victoria, Australia, designer and bamboo pioneer extraordinaire Linda Garland passed away surrounded by her immediate family and close friends.

Garland was born in 1948 in Newry, County Down, in Northern Ireland, to a family of Irish gentry. A wild child by her own admission, at 18 she ended up in London in the heady 1960s, working to become a designer. A near fatal car crash in Italy at 20 altered her life course dramatically. After months of hospitalization, armed with a small financial contribution from an uncle, she embarked on what was to become one of many adventures to remote parts of the world to collect fabrics and artifacts.

Eventually her travels brought her to Indonesia in the early 1970s, and in 1974 she settled down in Bali. Her endless curiosity and innovative spirit led her to explore and experiment with local crafts. She forged lasting friendships with many local artisans. By the 1980s, her interior design business was thriving, and many of her jet-set contacts from London began to take interest. Bamboo was featured heavily in her design work, and soon she was designing entire tropical dwellings for the likes of David Bowie, Richard Branson and Mick Jagger.

Naturalized through marriage to Amir Rabik, Garland became dismayed at the environmental destruction of forests and nature that accompanied modernization in Indonesia. She realized that bamboo could become a vital resource and solution to the situation. By the 1990s, her priorities had shifted to full-blown environmentalism with bamboo as her main tool, and in 1993 she founded the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, which then had affiliates overseas with the likes of the International Bamboo Foundation.

Together with Walter Liese from the University of Hamburg, Germany, Garland pioneered research into the commercial treatment of bamboo against the powderpost beetle. Their work ultimately led to making bamboo durable enough to replace timber as a building material and to setting up a proper training center in Bali for bamboo agroforestry and the commercial use of bamboo.

In 1995, the Environmental Bamboo Foundation hosted the IV International Bamboo Conference at her home, Panchoran Estate. Two thousands attendees from 37 countries came to the conference. Officially opened by then Indonesian environment minister Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, it was a landmark event: politicians, scientists, engineers, architects, environmentalists sat down together to work on developing and promoting bamboo.

Awarded the prestigious Upakarti Award, the highest recognition from the Indonesian government, by then president Soeharto and subsequently receiving an honorary PhD from the Dehradun Forestry Institute in India, in 1995, Garland became a leading international advocate for bamboo.

Eventually slowed down by a series of ailments related to the accident in her youth, she relegated much of the foundation’s field work to others, including her youngest son Arief Rabik, yet she remained active in networking and linking people together in projects.

In 2010, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She battled it with innovative alternative medicine and was cared for by her oldest son, artist Karim Rabik. She ended up surviving far longer than expected but finally succumbed to her illness on Jan. 3. She will be missed by many.

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