Made Wijaya (Michael White)

Wijaya is Bali's most famous gardener, an Australian architecture student and one-time Australian tennis pro who was suddenly asked to design the gardens for the Oberoi Hotel "having jumped ship and swum ashore in a rainstorm" in 1973 according to his biography.

The recently renovated and republished-in-paperback Balinese Gardens seems suspiciously like one big (beautiful) ad for this bloke: pages and pages are devoted to the Bali Hyatt Garden (which he renovated), the Jimbaran Bay Four Seasons Resort Garden (which he designed), and the Canggu Puri Mertha (he designed the hotel), but maybe it's just a reflection of his eminence. He also designed the Amandari in Ubud, the Australian Embassy's garden, and David Bowie's holiday house in the West Indies.

He certainly has an odd website: one of the first about Bali I've stumbled on with any evidence of its creator having a bullshit detector, and a well developed one at that. He publishes a magazine called Poleng. I'm yet to see a copy.

He lived once at Taman Bebek, in Sayan just out of Ubud, built on the site of the home of American ethnomusicologist, composer, and proponent in the West of gamelan music, Colin McPhee, who wrote one of the standard accounts of the 1930s in Bali, A House in Bali. It has 7 accommodations for tourists, and Villa Om Si in Sanur (US$200 per night for 4 people, $US35 per extra person) was also designed by him. Bali