Buri Ram roads ablaze with blooms thanks to sensational Grandma Jiew

“Grandma Jiew” has become a social-media sensation at the age of 75, after her efforts to beautify roads in Buri Ram caught a passerby’s interest.

A Facebooker recently posted photographs of an elderly woman watering plants along a road with the caption: “This young man drove by and saw beautiful flowers by the road. At first, he thought it was the local authorities, but it turned out to be this grandma. She pushes her cart to water the flowers that she had planted little by little. Passersby will never know she’s the one behind it. Admirable grandma!”

This post soon went viral, with many netizens applauding the grandma for her efforts.

Taking note of the post, many reporters headed to Buri Ram’s Khok Hua Chang Village to look for Kreuwan “Grandma Jiew” Anantachaiworakun and found her tending to plants by the road near her house.

She explained that she does not have children and after her husband died in 1999, she had nobody to take care of other than her nephew, who is now 17 and goes to university. She said she has always enjoyed gardening and after retiring as a teacher in 2009, she began planting flowers in the community, in front of her house and at the temple.

“I started planting flowers along the road because I feel lonely While working at school, I had plenty of tasks to complete. But after retiring, I didn’t know what to do. So I decided to plant flowers around the community where I live. I wanted the community and the temple to look nice and beautiful, instead of looking untidy with overgrown grass. Also, it makes me very happy when I see the flowers bloom. Gardening keeps me busy and relieves stress. It’s better than just staying at home doing nothing,” she said.

“I take care of two areas: the entrance to the village and in front of Thung Pho Temple, some 500 metres away.”

Her day begins with watering, weeding and fertilising her plants at the temple, and ends with her repeating the steps at the village entrance. This is a daily routine.

The flowering plants she has planted include the common purslane, hibiscus, zinnia and yellow bells. However, the most prominent are the common purslane, which started off as a little plant presented to her by the neighbours and has now propagated into several bushes. She later expanded her repertoire by purchasing three zinnia and yellow bell plants for 100 baht.

Gardening for this granny is not difficult, she says it helps keep her healthy and happy. After the post about her went viral, many people have shown up to meet and compliment her in person. She said she feels proud and believes that the “best thing we can do in life is to do good deeds. At least when our time is up, there will still be people who remember us”.

A resident said that Grandma Jiew’s flowers have made the community more attractive, adding that when the locals spot her gardening in the heat, they bring her a cold beverage and snacks and even give her a small amount of money to help pay for seeds and water used for the plants. She reportedly spends about 700 baht monthly on her roadside patch of green.