Welcome to my Horticulture Internship Blog!

My name is Azita Amini, member of the Fighting Texas Aggie Class of 2015, and welcome to my blog where I will be sharing the  aspects of horticulture as it relates to creating and maintaining the grounds of a zoo.

Tomorrow I start my first day at Zoo Negara, the National Zoo of Malaysia, in the city of Kuala Lumpur, the 10th largest city in South East Asia. Malaysia is a country with its southernmost tip in the tropics, which means the average daily temperature is between 70 and 90 F, 365 days of the year. Afternoon showers are the norm, and the plant life shows its appreciation with tropical beauty and enormous growth. It is a perfect place to observe tropical horticulture from Malaysia's beautiful coast line to interior mountain ranges.

How did I get started? Zoo Negara offers an Industrial Training Program to university students and accepts students from most career paths to train in its working society.  After a little research, I applied for the program and was notified of my acceptance in late December.

What can I expect? Zoo Negara spans 110 acres of land that is only 5 KM from the city center. It leads zoo industry standards in South East Asia by example with over 90% of it animals kept in naturally landscaped exhibits. Learning about these natural habitats and how to maintain them will be my primary goal during this internship.

Follow me during my eight week internship to see how a zoo is grown.

If you didn't look at them above, here are the hyperlinks to the Zoo Negara Website, a tourism video for Malaysia (with the classic Malaysian tourism song), and a video slideshow of Kuala Lumpur.