What Ponce Veridiano started to build 10 years ago, just a hundred meters or so from his first selfbuilt home in Nagcarlan, was a dream he initially planned to take his time building. He is hesitant about calling it a dream home because, as a “home builder,” this frustrated architect, at 64, is resolved to keep on dreaming.
But this second Nagcarlan home, sprawled across 15 hectares of a forest, is every square inch a dream, maybe even paradise, built around nature on a slope of hill thick with trees, plants, ferns, and vines, rolling gently down to the stillpristine, clear-as-crystal, flowing creek Sabang.
Born in Nagcarlan, where he grew up poor, praying even to a tree he would pass on the route to school on foot for a way out of poverty, Ponce has come full circle. He has found his way back home and, in fact, because life is a universe of dots that connect, the tree to which he would pray as a schoolchild happens to be within the estate he now calls his second home
Ponce left his hometown when he was very young, in pursuit of dreams. Determined to make something of his life, he did manage to finish school, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering. It was in a very junior post at Meralco, where he was to put his education to practice, that life led him to another path through the company’s Garden Club, which gave him ample opportunity to join horticultural activities like workshops and competitions.
Ponce’s stint at Meralco, particularly his Garden Club membership, introduced him to even bigger organizations involved in gardening, such as the Horticultural Society and the Philippine Orchid Show. It was to him a rediscovery or a reactivation of his inherent love for plants, these living things belonging to one of six big groups of nature’s animate beings, which feed on water and sunshine, growing in a matrix of minerals, liquids, and gases, and propagated by wind, bees, birds, bats, and butterflies.
Ponce’s first big break, after a few projects, which entrusted him with pocket gardens at condominiums in Manila, was courtesy of “Banana King” Antonio Floirendo Sr., who, among the first responders to former President Elpidio Quirino’s call for help in tapping the vast potential of Mindanao after World War II, turned what used to be thousands of hectares of unproductive marshland in Panabo, Davao del Norte into a goldmine of export-quality bananas. The late banana magnate dragged the young Ponce to Mindanao, where he would, selftaught, spend quite a while mastering the art of landscaping.
From then on, as if to reward him for heeding their call, the Fates—or more like his work—brought him more gardens to grow. Before long, he found himself turning spaces needing his green thumb and his lush ideas into gardens and patches of paradise for some of the Philippines’ most illustrious families, including the Zobels, the Sorianos, the Locsins, and the Cojuangcos. In 1996, the garden he designed for the Floirendos at Pearl Farm on Samal Island in Davao gained Architectural Digest’s nod as “The Most Beautiful Resort on Earth.” Of late, among his clients are shipping magnate Doris Magsaysay-Ho, retail maven Ben Chan, and construction moguls Alice Eduardo and Philip Cruz and his wife, Ching Cruz.
As for everyone else, the pandemic for Ponce has been a disruptor. He was in Nagcarlan when it began to close in on the country, forcing the government to declare a nationwide lockdown. He rushed back to Manila, refusing to be trapped so far away from it all, only to return as soon as he could. “I almost went crazy being stuck in Manila,” Ponce recounts, but being stuck in Nagcarlan allowed him to fast-track the construction of his second home on the creekside.
The pandemic also brought to Ponce a newfound passion— painting. He considers it newfound, although even as a young person he had dabbled in drawing. “It’s just that, while I was busy with landscaping, I would try, but nothing would come out,” he explains in the vernacular. “But during the pandemic, it just flowed out of me. I guess I needed focus, some concentration. Art demands time.”
As a painter, Ponce is prolific. “People ask me how long it takes me to do a painting and I say three hours. It’s true. Why should I lie about it?” he says. He wakes up at 2 a.m. to work on a painting—the canvas on the floor and he, often, on his hands and knees— until he is happy enough, goes back to sleep, and spends the next few days, sometimes up to a week, deciding whether or not the painting is done.
In no time, the Nagcarlan home, even as it was a work in progress—it still is to this day, with a new building under construction—has become a showcase of his works, the latest of which, as their titles like Celadon, Spring in Sabang, Flower Wheel, Million Flowers, Dancing Lady, and Bougainvillea would suggest, are as in bloom as his garden house.
Ponce used to paint just for his own artistic gratification, but one fine day during the pandemic, when most restaurants were closed or open only on a limited basis, a friend of his asked if she could bring her family, particularly her son and his fiancée, for a meal at the house. Immediately, his friend was drawn to a painting hung on a wall, asking if she could buy it. Surprised, Ponce said yes, “but I don’t know how to price it.” His friend took out her checkbook, signing a check for half a million pesos, and said, “Is this enough? If not, let me know because I really, really want it.”
Fast forward to March this year, Ponce mounted his very first exhibition at W17 on Chino Roces in Makati, featuring a collection of large-scale works in oils or acrylic composed mostly of abstracts, florals, nocturnes, nudes, and a geisha theme, all designed, as I wrote in my review of the exhibit, “to provide a high point to any living space in the way a garden, seen from a picture window, or a garden pond to which a twin set of doors can open up in a home, gives it conversational charm.” He has an upcoming show in August or September at the Drawing Room at Karrivin Plaza at Chino Roces Extension in Makati. “My friends tell me not to have too many shows, but I enjoy painting,” says Ponce. “I just can’t stop, so I keep doing it, but I guess I’ll have to keep many of them to myself for a while. This is why I set up a bodega (storeroom) in Manila. Here in Nagcarlan, come October, it gets very humid and the paintings might be prone to molds.”
Ponce’s second home, originally planned to provide him an alternate living space, has since become a gallery, open by invitation only, boasting not only of his current works, but also of many other objets d’art as well as nature’s wonders. In it, there’s a fine line, if at all, between indoor and outdoor. The dining area, for instance, connects to some parts of the home via stone steps the shape of lilies floating on the pond. Some spaces have no windows or doors, where foliage serves as dividers, and even some of the artworks are framed by stray branches or hanging vines. The bedrooms all open up to the flowing creek below.
Soon, Ponce says, he will launch a portion of the house as bed and breakfast. A stay, for sure, will feel like a few, reinvigorating days and nights in paradise.