THE BEST GARDEN IN ASIA

Hug a tree at Peradeniya’s Royal Botanical Gardens.

Kandy’s best secret is the Peradeniya Royal Botanical Gardens. Here, glorious, drunken avenues of Cook's Pines, Palmyra Palms, Double Coconuts, Cabbage Palms, and Royal Palms lead off into shady dells. The garden was refashioned in 1821 and is today one of the finest, if not the finest, botanical gardens in Asia; the modern garden set up by Alexander Moon for the receipt and experimentation of plants introduced for commercial development. Moon’s catalogue, published soon afterwards, listed one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven “Ceylon plants.”
This commercialisation of land was the start of a massive period of deforestation in the country. In 1881, 84% of Sri Lanka was forested. In less than 20 years, British colonial agriculture reduced forest coverage to just 70%.

Moon was one of a line of prodigious British gardeners in Sri Lanka, an enthusiastic enforcer of a project begun in 1810 under the advice of Sir Joseph Banks when a garden was opened on Slave Island in Colombo. In 1813, the garden moved to Kalutara, where there was more space for planting, before finally transferring to the better climate of Peradeniya. Now the gardens stretch over 150 acres, with 4,000 plant species filling the space.

Its palm collection is among the best in Asia, with about 220 species. Still, the garden’s chief glory is its arboretum of ten thousand trees, many over a hundred years old and relied upon to flower in stunning colours. Among them is a Javan fig tree with a canopy of about 1600 square meters.
There is even an arboretum of trees planted by famous people, including a huge Ironwood (Tsar Nicolas II); a somewhat stunted Camphor Tree (Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike); a Yellow Trumpet Tree (King Akihito of Japan), and a Sorrowless Tree (Queen Elizabeth II). A Cannonball Tree, planted in 1901 by King George V and Queen Mary of the United Kingdom, is, however, pipped to the post for age by the one growing at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.

Its bamboo collection includes the giant bamboo of Burma, the largest known in the world, yellow building bamboo, feather bamboo, prickly bamboo, and Dwarf Chinese bamboo. The fern collection includes over a hundred indigenous and exotic species, whilst the Spice Garden houses the oldest nutmeg trees in the world, including ones planted in 1840.

To any Sri Lankan, the term “kumarihaami” is immediately graspable. On the surface, it appears to merely, and somewhat cautiously, describe elderly ladies who enjoy considerable influence within their family and community. But this in no way captures the degree of social richness, and power - shot through with often obstinate and glittering eccentricity - that is a proper Kumarihaami. A cross between a dowager duchess and an exiled Queen, her word is law, and her recommendations are ignored at your very considerable peril. Nancy Aster, the Empress Dowager Cixi, or the fictional Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downtown Abby” are all good foreign examples. Sri Lankan examples today can be found in any town or village on the island. Or, better still, on the pages of many a contemporary Sri Lankan novel, not least Ashok Ferrey’s “The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons.” Peradeniya’s Royal Botanical Gardens, one hopes, has something of the Kumarihaami about it. Managed by a government department that excels as much in bureaucracy as in horticulture, its attributes, like those of the eternal dowager, imply that it will go on and on forever. This much, I hope, is true: “When great trees fall in forests,” said Maya Angelou, “small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.”