The colonial-era Royal Botanic Gardens near Kandy’s Temple of the Tooth was created as a ‘second Kew’
Storms, civil war and a tsunami cannot dim the appeal of botanical gardens. Nor can their colonial past. I have just been verifying this heartening truth by a targeted visit to Sri Lanka, punctuated by offering marigolds and a lilac-blue water lily before a tooth supposed to have belonged to Buddha. Sri Lanka now has five botanical gardens and five more are being planned. Those who scorn botanic gardens in the former British empire as if they are items of obsolete colonialism should consider Sri Lanka’s response and then recant. In 2004 that horrendous tsunami shattered lives and property on the island’s south coast. In 2006 planning began for a memorial, a new botanical garden on an expanse of ruined coastal scrub, sand and prickly weeds. In November 2013 it opened to visitors, the Mirijjawila Botanic Garden east of Galle, near Mattala international airport.
Already, 180 acres of an intended 300 have been planted in a master plan. London’s 2012 Olympic Park seems a timid sort of legacy when seen from Sri Lanka’s south coast. The new garden lies in a dry zone, selected because it needs very different plants to those in Sri Lanka’s other botanical gardens. The ground is as flat as an unrolled pancake from the British past. Long lines of red salvia in the first flower beds give no impression of the diversity which is then on view elsewhere. Twenty-six avenues of carefully chosen trees radiate outwards across a maturing master design. Cassia trees are growing apace and so are the varied types of palm. In March big beds of multicoloured bougainvilleas will be at their spectacular best. Only 10 years ago this ground was a sea-ravaged wasteland. A huge formal parterre is the centrepiece and there is even a hungry crocodile in the central lake.
