Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Ambling in the Inner Gardens | A Walk at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel
Transcript
- Ambling in the Inner Gardens | A Walk at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel What might you find as you amble gently around the home garden, wrapped in greenery and reds, at Sri Lanka’s The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel? “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees. For it was gardens, not love, that occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded, were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, it boasted a regimented perfection that even extended to a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well-mannered. Of course, it helped that armies of gardeners tended them, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said. Later, when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses, albeit with green bits. Over the years, I tested this theory in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner, on Bayswater balconies, in Welsh seaside cottages, and in Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle. We had bought, incautiously and without any help whatsoever, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. It's 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765, and until the civil war, the estate stretched over 100 acres with three working elephants. When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had been reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around. Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed. So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice. Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites. Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly, slowly, our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created four different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets. Of these four walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments. This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height make it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species. Layard’s parakeet is easy to spot, as it has a long, light-blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness for sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub. Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: the Alexandrine parakeet, similar to the rose-ringed parakeet but much larger. It’s a bit of a city dweller. The other, the sparrow-small, endemic Sri Lankan hanging parrot or lorikeet is a rare creature: a twitcher’s crowning glory. All these birds can be found in G. M. Henry’s celebrated 1958 Guide to The Birds of Ceylon, which sits in the hotel library, together with some of his original watercolours. Henry was one of the last great ornithologists – the sort you would fight to sit next to at dinner. A discoverer as much as a describer of species, he wrote extensively about the island’s wildlife. Born on a tea estate in Sri Lanka in 1891, he wrote a bird guide that is remarkable not only for its comprehensiveness but also for its entertainment value. His descriptions are unforgettable and funny; of the lorikeet, he remarks, the bird is not simply another parrot but a convivial and restless one with highly ridiculous breeding habits. Reading his identifiers, you almost feel you have met the bird concerned at a party, conference, dentist’s waiting room or orgy. Close to our blushing Cassia is KASHYAPA’S CORNER, a small garden of Frangipani trees, named for the anonymous 5th-century mistress of Kashyapa, the king who built the Sigiriya pleasure palace, where he partied for 22 years before being murdered. Its frescoes show her holding the wickedly fragrant frangipani flowers – wicked, because, despite lacking nectar, their dreamy scent tricks moths into pollinating them. Arguments rage gently over whether there are 20 or 100 species of the tree, but none of this matters in Sri Lanka, where temple-goers have so eagerly adopted the plant that it is called the "Araliya" or "Temple Flower Tree". South American by origin, it spread around the world on the backs of gardening missionaries. However, this does nothing to explain how its flowers came to be depicted at Sigiriya over 1,500 years ago. A small tree, rarely more than 20 feet high, it flowers in shades of red and yellow, white, and peach; and even when bare, it is as close to an architectural marvel as any tree can get. Stretching out beyond KASHYAPA’S CORNER is a croquet lawn, instead unwisely planted with Australian grass for its smoother velvety feel, but continually under siege by the more rampant and feisty Malaysian grass, which possesses the invasive qualities of pirates. A much-sheared golden dewdrop hedge surrounds it; the plant is liberally tolerant of the hardest pruning and has become something of a poster girl for tropical topiarists. Growing through them are a few dozen stately Queen Palms. We call them DONA CATHERINA’S PALMS, after the island’s most beguiling queen, Kusumasana Devi. Three times tempestuous queen of Kandy (1581 to 1613), Dona Catherina died of grief, outwardly Buddhist, inwardly Catholic. It was her bad luck to be caught up in the wars between the Portuguese and the kings of Kotte and Kandy, and as the last descendant of the original Kandyan kings, she was a pawn of immense value. Nowadays, the various lines of Sri Lankan kings are all but untraceable, and these palms, like most surviving monarchs today, are more decorative than helpful. Their saffron-orange seeds have limited edible value; they are sweet, with a flavour that ranges from plum to banana depending on maturity. The paved pathway that leads from the front porch to the main building is the LIPSTICK WALK, named for the young Lipstick Palms that line it. This species crept inexorably from Southeast Asia to South Asia, its progress fuelled by a reputation for glamour and beauty, if not utility. An older pair opposite this walk was planted in 1926, the year Marilyn Monroe was born. Monroe, queen of lipsticks and, in many ways, not dissimilar to these palms, wore Guerlain's Rouge Diabolique lipstick, which is as red as these palms. Her lithograph, by Andy Warhol, hangs in the Singing Civet Bedroom. The path first passes an old clove tree – our BABY SPICE TREE, so called because cloves are one of the island’s most recent spices, having arrived here with medieval Arab traders. Its aromatic status has not stopped its tiny fruits from being widely incorporated into some of the country’s most popular dishes, including black chicken curry, pineapple bread, and, best of all, garlic curry, a savoury dish of coconut milk, garlic, and cloves rarely tasted beyond Adam’s Bridge. The clove tree sits alongside our AUSSIE TREE. Grown from a seed from Stellenbosch, this Illawarra Flame Tree hails from Eastern Australia and is noted for its blood red flowers, famously varied leaf shapes and sultry nature. As Simply Red put it in their song, “A new flame has come, and nothing she can do can do me wrong.” This tree can do little wrong either; its shade of red eludes even the most subtle of Pantone references. At the end of the pathway is a tree we call KING MUTASIVA’S BELLY. To ayurvedic practitioners, there is little this tree cannot cure. Its common name is the Beli Tree. For centuries, it has been planted outside walawwas to ensure all-around fertility - from crops to heirs. Given this task, and the fact that this specimen is rarely without fruit. It seemed only fair to name it after the 4th-century BCE King Mutasiva, the island’s most fecund monarch. Six of his 12 progeny became kings. Mutasiva is an oddly vexing historical being, the sixth recorded monarch on the island and only the second to rule from Anuradhapura. This city would dominate the country for 1500 years before finally being obliterated by Tamil invaders. But almost nothing is known about him. His grandfather founded the capital he was to inherit, and his son was to introduce Buddhism to the land. Between them, these three earliest of island monarchs can take the credit for much of the best of what the country was to become, even if the long reign of Mutasiva is a study in obscurity. Research into very early Sri Lankan history remains a singular endeavour, but the slightest glimpse of its times is enormously exciting, if only because it is so rare. And ancient though Mutasiva was, an even older item sits in the hotel library, a ceramic dating back to 600 BCE, 300 years before Buddhism arrived; 200 years before King Mutasiva; and 50 years before the reign of the island’s first recorded king in 543 BCE. The path ends at the main hotel building. To its valley side lies the art deco Pineapple House, and before it a tiled Spice Court, which was used in the old days to lay out spices such as pepper and cloves to dry naturally in the sun. At one end sit two large stone slabs, used by croppers to sharpen their machetes. On the other side of the main building is ARCHIE’S IDYLL. Named for Tintin’s Captain Haddock, who made the journey from alcoholic sea Captain to a country gent, Archibald was born next door to Highgrove and has an ancestry that makes the Windsors look relatively recent. From his office, or on site, Archibald assiduously polices this garden, a home to the island’s controversial national animal – the grizzled giant squirrel; and more commonly, Palm and Dusky Striped Squirrels, this former species not to be confused with the rarer endemic Layard's Palm Squirrel. Sri Lanka is actually home to seven squirrel species, only two of which are endemic, the Dusky-Striped Squirrel and Layard's Palm Squirrel. The Grizzled Giant Squirrel, though not endemic, is the most impressive of the lot, with a nose-to-tail length of one and a half metres and death-defying skills enabling it to make the most impossible leaps from tree to tree. In Sri Lanka, it hugs the central highlands and comes in three sub-variants that are all but indistinguishable. All three sport brown fur, white legs and stomachs, and frosted faces. They have excellent vision but poor hearing, which is something of a blessing for them as their cry - a shrill staccato cackle – is the sort of sound that can curdle milk. A wild Kohu Amba Mango shades the garden, excellent for making chutney, and a Jaffna Willard Mango, the go-to fruit for instant gratification. Young yellow Frangipani shade the lawn. Beyond its gates runs the slip road for trade deliveries and a flight of steps that take you up into Singing Civet Hill. ARCHIE’S IDYLL is surrounded on one side by THE JURASSIC WALL. The Maha-Madu Trees that grow above this retaining wall are descendants of the cycads that dominated the earth 300 million years ago, and are growing on happily here, an inspiration for our tenacious old-fashioned values. Nestled amongst them are Poinsettias (popular with the 13th-century Aztecs and later Western supermarkets at Christmas); Madagascan Traveller’s Palms; sweet-scented Indo Chinese Sapu Trees (sacred to Buddhists and the largest of magnolias); Cook and Norfolk Island Pines; Flame, Jackfruit, Jacaranda, and cinnamon. At the other end of the main buildings, overlooking the pool and the expanse of forested hills and valleys that stretch to the south and west, is a small extension to this walk, a sort of OUTER GARDEN WALK. It begins at BIANCA’S AMPHITHEATRE. This amphitheatre, one of just three or four on the island, is named for the estate’s most senior director, Kumarihaami, and opera singer, Bianca Castafiore, born beside Garsington Opera. It was built as much to forestall landslides as to direct Bianca’s melodious version of the Jewel Song in Faust out into the jungle (by the way, the complete works of Tintin can be found in the library). When we first arrived here, gravity was sucking the buildings into the valley. To forestall utter destruction, the amphitheatre's walls were built to a depth of about 20 feet, with a six-foot-wide base tapering to slim walls above ground. “And so rock bottom, wrote JK Rowling, “became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” Private sun igloos fill the amphitheatre’s first terrace for people who want utter peace. In front of them is SHOSTAKOVICH’S TEA, a tea terrace named for the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who reworked the famous “Tea for Two” Twenties hot song. His life, like the creation of this symbolic bank of Sri Lankan tea, was a struggle – but one that succeeded. We think the song celebrates the laid-back solitude of this jungle estate. “We won't have it known, That we own a telephone, dear,” wrote Irving Caesar, the song’s creator in 1924, 100 years after the island's very first tea was planted – just 12 miles away in Peradeniya’s Royal Botanical Gardens. At the amphitheatre’s bottom is COCO’S PAVILLION. Named for the youngest of the Estate’s directors, and the one most given to the invention of new forms of relaxation, the Coco Pavilion is where yoga, massage, meditation and even a little exercise can flow without interruption. Opposite it is BERTIE’S KITCHEN. With his alpha appetite, Bertie, named after Tintin’s Professor Cuthbert Calculus, is the muse behind this outdoor Demonstration Kitchen, where classic Sri Lankan recipes can be made and shared in the shadow of an Australian Foxtail Palm. This palm was a discovery made in the Aboriginal territories of the Bathurst Bay - that part of northern Queensland that points like a finger towards Papua New Guinea. Out in the jungle in 1975, a wandering botanist came across a palm he was unfamiliar with. Years of checking, investigation and discussion with the local Flinders Island Aboriginal peoples eventually led to the conclusion that it was a totally new species. In honour of the tribe, it was named Wodyetia in 1978. But its uncommonly fluffy leaves, which resemble the tail of a fox, soon promoted an alternative name: the foxtail palm. The base of the amphitheatre is planted with papyrus, frangipani, date palms and rather truculent Kottamba trees, popular additions to roadside cafes for the gorgeous green shade their waxy leaves provide. Its medical prowess eclipses its leisure uses: its leaves and bark have proven helpful in treating liver diseases, dysentery, diarrhoea, invasive parasites, and even some cancers. From here, the view stretches into the deliberately left-wild jungle, the hillside dropping to paddy land and small streams. From a side gate, the walk continues into CITRUS ENGESTROMA. Here, in between the mother-in-law’s tongue and lemon grass grow lemons, limes, kumquats, grapefruit, clementines, bitter oranges, tangerines, caviar oranges, and pomegranates – and a sprinkling of Ruffled, Stilt and Golden Palms, Areca and Coconuts. The grove is named for our Engeström family, who kept the lawyers of Malmö busy for over 100 years as the family sued one another down the generations. The official portrait of Edward Engestrom, who built a small palace overlooking the Baltic, hangs in the dining room, along with family daguerreotypes from the 1840s. The path leads into THE ORCHID WALK, an occasionally manicured jungle area of mahogany and flame trees, the odd clove and pine. This area of the walk is given over to orchids. One hundred and eighty-five of the world’s 25,000 orchid species grow on the island, 74 of them endemic, and this walk is named for them. They grow in cracks in the huge stone blocks of an ancient wall, their space shared with skinks and chameleons. In monsoon weather, an adjacent well turns the area into a cathedral of evangelistic frogs, dedicated to nighttime choruses. The path eventually takes you back close to the very start - the small garden of Frangipani trees that is KASHYAPA’S CORNER. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.