Colonial Greenery: Botanical Gardens and British Imperialism

The time in which we live today – the Anthropocene – is defined primarily by the ways in which humans have impacted, and continue to impact, the physical world around us. The human imprint on the world is often talked about today in relation to crises such as climate change, within which humans certainly play the central role. However, while the damage humans have enacted on nature is at the forefront of many narratives of life in the Anthropocene, countless discussions within the field of environmental history also explore how humans attempt to preserve or better understand the environment, through the creation of spaces like a nature preserve or national park. Another example of this is the botanical garden: a curated space in nature, wherein the landscape is carefully manicured, and vast collections of flora and fauna are brought together, often from origins all around the world. However, botanical gardens are far more than the idyllic spaces that find themselves flooded with tourists throughout each year. Rather, these human-made spaces in nature have been identified as catalysts in “profound socio-ecological changes […] playing central roles in the development of new governance techniques within the living, material, and discursive frameworks that the Anthropocene conjures.”[1] A purely environmental history-focused approach may neglect to address the larger social, political, cultural, economic, and epistemological histories or structures within which botanical gardens exist. Thus, botanical gardens may be better understood if also studied in conjunction with other historical fields, such as colonial history and the history of knowledge. Such a transversal analysis of the botanical garden is what this research paper aims to carry out.

In this paper, I look at the botanical garden as an object from which a history of the British empire can be read. Through a focus on the British empire’s creation and use of botanical gardens, I explore how colonial Britain shaped the environment, pursued scientific knowledge, and bolstered their wealth through the trade of natural materials. The essay begins with a brief history of botanical gardens, outlining how the main functions of these gardens changed over time, as they developed from a place of leisure and medicinal study to a colonial instrument of power. Following this contextualization, I will then outline the histories of three botanical gardens created by the British empire in the 18th and 19th centuries: the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya (Sri Lanka), and Kew Gardens in London, England. Through a focus on botanical gardens located both in mainland Britain and its former colonies, this paper will explore the flows of plant life, money, and knowledge within the British empire. Following the historicizing of the aforementioned botanical gardens, the essay will conclude with a final analysis, in which the key environmental, economic, and epistemic effects of the botanical gardens are identified. Ultimately, through an investigation into British colonial botanical gardens that ties together environmental history, colonial history and the history of knowledge, this research project explores one of many instances of life in the Anthropocene wherein humans have shaped, but have also been shaped by, the environment.

The History of Botanical Gardens

 Before the linkages between botanical gardens and British colonial history can be explored, it is important to first understand the history of botanical gardens themselves, and the conditions under which they were first created and utilized. Throughout history, botanical gardens have served a variety of purposes, which the sociologist Katja Grötzner Neves effectively sums up as the three key functions of the botanical garden: “the secularization of knowledge, the establishment of science, and the appropriation of plants for economic gain”.[2] To view botanic gardens simply as “quaint museum-like sites […] offering leisurely opportunities for visitors to enjoy greens, flowers, and architectural heritage”[3] obscures the significant connections these structures have to complex histories of politics, economics, and knowledge production.

Arthur W. Hill, a botanist and the former director of the botanical gardens at Kew, explains that the original founders of the concept of the botanical garden were the Chinese. Hill specifically draws attention towards the Emperor Shen Nung, of the 28th century B.C. – the “Father of Medicine and Husbandry” who first discovered and experimented with the medicinal qualities of herbs.[4] This discovery led to the dispatch of plant collectors throughout China’s regions, culminating in the cultivation of plants for medicinal and economic value as exhibited in the monastic herb gardens of the ninth century A.D.[5] While it has been established that the Chinese pioneered botanical gardening practices, the oldest botanical garden that historians have been able to identify traces of is the Royal Garden of Thutmose III, built in Egypt around the year 1000 B.C.[6] However, rather than as a center of scientific experimentation or knowledge production, it has been argued that this was a “pleasure garden”[7] to be used exclusively by the pharaoh. Furthermore, alongside educational, medicinal, and recreational purposes, the environmental historian Timothy P. Barnard identifies certain power dynamics inherent within the construction and use of botanical gardens. According to Barnard, botanical gardens are “self-contained entities in which flora and fauna are cultivated, controlled, and manipulated to serve the interests of the gardener. They reflect attempts to influence nature, ultimately to shape it, and are created to serve those with power over their grounds.”[8] Botanical gardens thus hold within themselves a history of human domination over nature, and arguably a domination over other humans as well.

While there is a long history of botanical gardens in Asia and Africa, such gardens didn’t become prominent in Europe until the 18th century, with the earliest European botanical gardens being found in Leiden, Padua, and Gothenburg.[9] Botanical gardens emerging in Europe were quickly associated with the growth of trade empires, as these gardens were often used in order to establish a greater knowledge of the plants – such as nutmeg, pepper or cloves – forming the “key trade products of the pre-industrial global economy”.[10] As such, botanical gardens in Europe became instrumental to the expansion and maintenance of colonial empires abroad. Eventually, colonial powers began to construct botanical gardens within their colonies: the Dutch founded a botanical garden in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1817, the French founded the Pamplemousses Gardens in Mauritius in 1735, and the English began to develop the Peradeniya Gardens in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) in 1821, to name a few examples.[11]

Over time, botanical gardens transformed from sites of knowledge production and innovation to tools of colonial power. What follows in this paper is a closer look at the function of botanical gardens as instruments of colonial expansion, with a particular focus on three gardens created by the British empire: the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, and Kew Gardens in London. Through this approach, I hope to not only shed light on the unique histories of these three gardens, but to also explore the important links between environmental history, colonial history, and the history of knowledge.

The Singapore Botanic Gardens

“The Caribbean royal palms stand in two files like terracottas of a lost battalion.

The old gum braces lean and fair; and nearby bends the Italian cypress to a cool lawn;

and the grand, gouty paper-bark tree is now a patriarch of bright-dimpled flying insects

and of the common birds, shedding everywhere with glad age.”

Gwee Li Sui - “Jurassic Garden” (1998)[12]

The British, notably the colonial official Sir Stamford Raffles, first arrived in Singapore in January of 1819. Raffles intended to establish a new British trading base in Singapore, in order to challenge the Dutch trading presence in Southeast Asia. Singapore was an ideal location for a trade city, and it had a history of trade going back to the 14th century. The city had “an excellent natural harbor, ample timber supplies and fresh drinking water. Moreover, it sat astride some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.”[13]

Over the first 40 years of the British rule in Singapore, the island had devolved into a “massively disturbed ecosystem as a result of efforts to make land profitable through the cultivation of export products.”[14] The dense jungles that once covered the island were systematically torn down and transformed into plantations. Barnard explains that the cultivation of two main resources in these plantations, pepper and gambier, exhausted the soil and turned Singapore’s hinterlands into a “deforested wasteland.”[15] This wasteland covered nearly a third of the entire island by the mid-1850s.

Throughout these early years of British control, there were a few unsuccessful attempts to create gardens and cultivate the land more thoughtfully. For instance, Raffles proposed a plan to create an experimental garden when he first arrived in 1819. This “Botanical and Experimental Garden” came to fruition in 1822 but was abandoned only seven years later in 1829 due to the financial pressures coming from the First Anglo-Burmese War.[16] Following this failure to maintain a nature preserve in Singapore, a long period of thirty years went by during which there were two more failed attempts to create gardens in the city. These two attempted gardens were initiated by the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Singapore, founded in 1836. However, despite their failures, it was this same Society that proposed yet another plan for a Singaporean botanical garden in 1859, which is the same garden that still stands today.[17]

The botanical garden founded in 1859 was initially intended to be a private garden, to be used for recreational purposes exclusively by members of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society, who were primarily colonial officials, landowners, and traders.[18] The British government gave the Agricultural and Horticultural Society 56 acres of land upon which to build this botanical garden.[19] These 56 acres (or 23 hectares) of exhausted and overgrown land were transformed in order to replicate the popular design of the English landscape at the time, a style that “idealized nature through the creation of rolling hills and avoided the symmetry and formality of ‘power gardens,’ such as Versailles and the Belvedere Courtyard.”[20] By the early 1860s, the botanic gardens began generating revenue for the government, as members of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society paid to attend events such as flower shows. Notably, the generation of money was the main function of Singapore’s Botanic Gardens in its earliest years. However, due to the exclusivity of the gardens and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s insistence that it remain for members only, the flow of money into the garden began to slow down and by the mid-1870s it was at the risk of closing down.

In 1874, the British government purchased the Singapore Botanic Gardens from the Agricultural and Horticultural Society and enacted a variety of changes.[21] First, the botanical gardens became open to all visitors. Second, and arguably most important, the gardens would now pursue a greater focus on scientific research and the cultivation of resources to better support the economic interests of the empire. Officials managing the Kew Gardens in London were brought to Singapore to spearhead this shift towards scientific and economic production.

An Herbarium was built in the gardens in 1882, within which the head of the Herbarium, H. N. Ridley, hoped to store “specimens of every plant for each of the States [of the Malay Peninsula]”, as well as from Borneo, Thailand, Sumatra, Java, and Christmas Island.[22] As a result of the work he was able to pursue in the Herbarium of Singapore’s Botanical Gardens, Ridley alone is credited with discovering more than a thousand new plant species.[23] Alongside the creation of initiatives like the Herbarium, intended to develop scientific knowledge, the British government also introduced facets of the botanical garden intended to reverse some of the more harmful impacts that resource extraction and poor farming techniques had ravaged on the island’s landscape. Notably, a Forest Department was created within the Singapore Botanic Gardens in 1883.[24] This department, using the knowledge and resources developed within the Botanic Gardens, planted a mixture of native and imported trees in reserves throughout the city.

Perhaps the most notable change to the Botanic Gardens after the British government took control was the introduction of the Economic Garden. As suggested by its name, this section of the Singapore Botanic Gardens was devoted to growing only the most lucrative resources for trade, namely coffee and rubber. The coffee grown in the Economic Garden was imported from Liberia (via Kew), and by 1880 it was the main agricultural export from Singapore and the Straits Settlements as a whole.[25] Another lucrative resource that was introduced to the Singapore Botanic Gardens in the 20th century was the orchid, with the Vanda Miss Joaquim variety becoming Singapore’s national flower in 1981.

Founded over 160 years ago, the Singapore Botanic Gardens have a long history, a large portion of which is defined by British colonial control. The gardens served as “a site from which its gardeners spread their influence into numerous realms through a mastery of nature.”[26] The Botanic Gardens saw the development of a significant amount of agricultural knowledge, contributing greatly to the history of knowledge as a whole. However, these gardens also bolstered British imperial control, allowing them to more effectively produce the ideal resources to be traded and increase their empire’s affluence. Through this look into the history of the Botanic Gardens, it becomes very clear how Singapore’s landscape (both within and beyond the confines of the Gardens themselves) were shaped by the economic and scientific desires of the Western world.

When Singapore was granted independence in 1965, the Botanic Gardens were placed under the guidance of the National Parks Board, who continues to manage them to this day, with a main focus on maintaining this as a site of leisure and continuing the quest for scientific knowledge. Today, these gardens are an official UNESCO World Heritage Site, attracting millions of tourists to the city each year.

The Royal Botanical Gardens, Peradeniya

“The gardens were the legacy of a marriage

that was now long over. Around the perimeter

fruit bats rode the thermals like prehistoric birds,

and the giant Java fig tree, its branches

propped, the sprawling system of its roots exposed,

had risen up in chaos from its central lawn.”

David Cooke - “In the Peradeniya Gardens” (2012)[27]

Unlike in Singapore, a long history and tradition of gardening existed in Sri Lanka prior to colonial influences, extending back hundreds of years into the island’s history. Before the establishment of colonial botanical gardens, the historian Dhanesh Wisumperuma explains that there were four prominent types of gardens in Sri Lanka: “royal gardens, urban gardens, monastic gardens and home gardens.”[28] While a majority of these gardens were intended for private use, there is also evidence pointing towards attempts made in the Polonnaruwa period (1017-1232) to create public gardens.[29]

 After the British gained control of Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) in 1796, there were various attempts to build off of the existing practices of gardening and to establish botanical gardens throughout the country. However, the British were not the first colonial powers to create a botanical garden in Sri Lanka. Prior to the British rule, Sri Lanka was colonized by the Dutch, who endeavored to construct a botanical garden on Slave Island, a small island near Colombo.[30] While it is unclear exactly when the Dutch established this garden, there are records of its existence extending as far back as 1710.[31] This botanical garden was a fruitful resource for the Dutch but was eventually neglected when the British gained possession of Sri Lanka in 1796. Rather than continue to work in the former Dutch gardens on Slave Island, the British attempted to create a brand new botanical garden in Colombo in 1799. Under the guidance of Frederic North, the British governor of Sri Lanka at the time, the garden was to be built along the banks of the Kelani River in Colombo.[32] A lack of historical records makes the exact history of this garden unclear, but in a 2017 study into the traces of this garden in Sri Lankan archives, Wisumperuma was able to conclude that a detailed proposal for this botanical garden was indeed developed, but was ultimately abandoned for reasons unknown.[33]

After this failed attempt to create a botanical garden in Colombo, the British returned their attention to the site of the former Dutch botanical garden in 1810. After nearly 15 years of neglect, the existing botanical garden on Slave Island had fallen into disrepair. As a result, the British, under the guidance of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, elected to create a new botanical garden on Slave Island, giving it the same name as the primary botanical garden in Britain – Kew.[34] Kew Gardens on Slave Island stood from 1810 to 1821, when it was then renamed and relocated to Peradeniya (a suburban area of the larger city of Kandy), where the Royal Botanical Gardens can be found today. The Royal Botanical Gardens were built upon what remained of the former royal garden of the King Kirti Sri of Kandy, a portion of land extending over 140 acres.[35] After the botanical garden was relocated to its permanent site at Peradeniya at the beginning of the 1820s, it was used for two main purposes: the production of resources for trade and the development of scientific knowledge. Notably, the recreational use of this garden was not a primary focus for the British at the time, unlike what was seen with botanical garden in Singapore. However, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya are a very popular recreational spot today, attracting roughly 1.2 million visitors a year.[36]

When it came to the production of lucrative resources for British trading, in the earliest years of the Royal Botanical Gardens’ existence, the primary plants grown were coffee and cinnamon. This changed slightly after the mid-1840s, when a variety of non-native plants were imported from Kew, such as tea, the Brazilian rubber tree, and various cinchona plants.[37] Alongside the economically motivated production of certain plants, of additional importance in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya was the development of scientific knowledge. This is exhibited clearly in “A Catalogue of the Indigenous and Exotic Plants Growing in Ceylon”, an 1824 compendium published by Alexander Moon, the superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens at the time. Using the resources available in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya, specifically in the National Herbarium established during the 1821 re-location, Moon was able to study and give names to over 1,100 species of plants indigenous to Sri Lanka.[38] Today, over 200 years later, the National Herbarium has expanded Moon’s catalogue to include over 132,000 specimens of plants.[39] Arthur W. Hill (the assistant director at Kew Gardens in London from 1907 to 1922) sums up the efficacy of the Royal Botanical Gardens’ research capacities in a 1915 article, wherein he claimed that “the scientific researches in pure and applied botany, in tropical mycology and chemistry, and the cultural experiments which have been carried out in the Gardens and laboratory in Ceylon have thoroughly justified the existence of the institution at Peradeniya, and prove, if proof were needed, the inestimable value of scientific botanical establishments in the tropics.”[40]

While gardening itself was not a new practice in Sri Lanka, the introduction of the British colonial influence vastly changed what the environment and practices looked like within Sri Lankan gardens. Ultimately, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Peradeniya were established in accordance with the pursuit of two British colonial goals: to produce more resources for trade, and to further the amount of new scientific knowledge coming out of Britain. This pursuit of scientific knowledge continues within the Royal Botanical Gardens today, and rather than being monetarily stimulated by the production of trade resources, the botanical gardens today receive their funding through the notable number of visitors they attract each year.

Kew Gardens

“Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and

women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains

of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees…”

Virginia Woolf - "Kew Gardens” (1921)[41]

Of the three botanical gardens discussed in this paper, Kew Gardens is the oldest, having been founded in 1759 by Princess Augusta.[42] As the social anthropologist Vibe Nielsen argues, Kew Gardens thus “predates the time during which the British Empire was the largest the world has ever seen”.[43] As Britain gained more colonies and expanded its control over the globe, Kew Gardens developed in tandem, a dynamic wherein we see how the gardens at Kew “paralleled the rise of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and in the process became the most important botanic garden in the world.”[44] Today, Kew Gardens occupies 300 acres (121 hectares) of land, upon which visitors can find buildings like the Herbarium and Fungarium, containing over 8.5 million plant and fungi specimens, and the Library, containing over 750,000 volumes of horticultural history, travel literature, plant anatomy and so on.[45]

Similar to the Singapore Botanic Gardens, Kew began in the 18th century as a recreational space, originally existing on royal “pleasure grounds”.[46] Over time, however, Kew Gardens was transformed into a research institution and by the 1840s was seen as a “major metropolitan node in a complex network of a global botanical empire.”[47] Whereas the botanical gardens in Singapore and Sri Lanka were partially used for the production of resources to be traded, the primary function of Kew Gardens was to research these plants in order to better understand how they could be cultivated within the colonies themselves. Kew Gardens was also used as a space in which the British could display their own power, with expansive collections of unique plants that “illustrated how far and wide the British Empire stretched across the globe.”[48] Plants from far-reaching British colonies were imported to Kew Gardens to be studied – particularly plants which had a promising potential for trade. By 1820, over 7,000 new varieties of plants had been transported to Kew Gardens in order to be studied.[49] According to officials at Kew in the early 20th century, Kew Gardens’ “sphere of usefulness is largely concerned with the economic aspect of botany, and it is her aim and object to encourage and assist, as far as possible, scientific botanists, travellers, merchants and manufacturers, in their varied botanical investigations.”[50] A vast amount of research was thus carried out at Kew, motivated by the desire to generate more wealth for the British empire.

It would be a mistake, however, to hastily conclude that the expansive research practices carried out at Kew Gardens were entirely productive or harmless in the development of scientific knowledge. A crucial aspect of bringing non-native plants to Kew Gardens was the separation of plants from the Indigenous knowledge and contexts in which they already existed. As such, Indigenous knowledge of plants was far too often “lost in the process of systematizing the flora and fauna of the world into one, European-founded, Latin system.”[51] For instance, records at Kew notably lacked any trace of the cultural significance of the banana plant for Hawaiian peoples, or of the ironwood for Tahitians.[52] The neglect of cultural significance is a crucial aspect of the history of knowledge that would not be as effectively understood without an interdisciplinary reading of a botanical garden such as Kew Gardens, bringing in insights from the realms of colonial and environmental histories. A critical attitude such as this has been called for by many scholars, such as Vibe Nielsen in her paper “The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew”, wherein she interrogates the extent to which British colonial history is easily visible within the displays at Kew Gardens today. Nielsen ultimately concludes that the colonial history of the plants on display in Kew Gardens is only “superficially presented”, and this lack of visible history threatens to perpetuate “colonial-era worldviews that present ‘discoveries’ of ‘new found’ species with a level of pride that at best reflects inattention, at worst exclusive Eurocentrism.”[53]

Kew Gardens was a significant center for scientific research and the development of botanical knowledge throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The lands were carefully treated so as to effectively grow plants to be researched, as well as to serve as a symbol of the power of the British empire at the time. Today, Kew Gardens still stand as a testament to the influence of British imperialism, both on environments around the world, as well as on the history of knowledge as a whole.

The Impact of Colonial Botanical Gardens

 The three botanical gardens in focus in this paper all came about in unique ways and had varying impacts on the British empire, and perhaps the world as a whole. In order to bring together the discussions of these botanical gardens, this final section highlights the three main areas upon which colonial British botanical gardens had the greatest impact.

Impact on Knowledge

The British quest to develop botanical knowledge is, arguably, the most significant thread that ties the botanical gardens in Singapore, Peradeniya, and London together. All three of these botanical gardens were utilized as centers for experimentation and research, as scholars aimed to classify Indigenous plants, as well as to better understand how and where certain trade resources could be most effectively grown. The creation of and practices carried out by these botanical gardens had a notable impact on the history and production of botanical knowledge.

Impact on Trade

While all three botanical gardens contributed to research that helped improve the production of plants for trade, such resource production took place mainly in two of the three gardens: Singapore and Peradeniya. Lucrative resources such as coffee, rubber, tea, orchids, and more were produced in these two gardens and transported around the world for trade, bolstering the wealth of the British empire.

Impact on the Environment

The creation of botanical gardens led to the introduction of many non-native plant species in each of the gardens in focus, changing the appearance of the environment within each garden. The landscapes of these gardens were often shaped in accordance with British cultural ideals, such as the picturesque rolling hills of the English landscape. However, the most notable impact on the environment took place within the Singapore Botanic Garden, as its resources were used to counter deforestation and reverse the negative impact that British farming initially had on the island as a whole.

Conclusion

Within the epoch of the Anthropocene in which we exist today, we think of the environment in terms of how it relates to us humans – in how humans have shaped the environment, or vice versa. Therefore, what I intended to shed light on in this research is the necessity, when doing environmental history in the Anthropocene, to consider how the environment’s past and present (and perhaps future) are shaped by, or perhaps are most effectively understood through, other branches of human history. Furthermore, this case study has argued that a complete understanding of the political, economic, and epistemic dominance that colonial Britain held cannot be gained without an attentiveness towards the role of the environment, and more specifically, the role of botanical gardens. As Barnard says quite succinctly in Nature’s Colony, “an understanding of plants was the basis for power, and the transformation of this knowledge into a control over land and economies in distant colonies occurred in botanic gardens.”[54] To eliminate a focus on the environment and how it was manipulated would critically undermine any attempts to better understand how the British empire became as powerful and influential as it did.

Looking forward, further research into the conjunctions between colonial history and environmental history – through the lens of the botanical garden – would potentially benefit from an exploration of tourism as a modern-day form of neo-colonialism. Such an approach could shed light onto the ways in which the legacies of colonial history continue to exist in the present, imprinted upon the very face of the Earth itself.

[1] Katja Grötzner Neves, Postnormal Conservation: Botanic Gardens and the Reordering of Biodiversity Governance (NY, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019), 2.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Arthur William Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 2 (1915): 185–240, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.31145, 186.

[5] Ibid., 187.

[6] Ibid., 186.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 1.

[9] Ibid., 2.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 4.

[12] Gwee Li Sui, “Jurassic Gardens,” Gweek Culture: World of Terrifying Secret Opinions, October 10, 2015, https://gweek.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/jurassic-gardens/.

[13] Jim Baker, Crossroads: A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2020), 63.

[14] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 14.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 19.

[17] Ibid., 23.

[18] Stuart Lindsay and David Middleton, “The Gardens of Singapore – Enthusing and Educating the Public in the World of Plants,” Sibbaldia: The International Journal of Botanic Garden Horticulture 16 (2018): 169–77, 170.

[19] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 23.

[20] Ibid., 25.

[21] Ibid., 26.

[22] Ruth Kiew, “The Herbarium - 125 Years of History,” Gardenwise: The Newsletter of the Singapore Botanic Gardens 8 (July 1999): 6–9, 6.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Lena Chan, “The Role of the Gardens in the History of Nature Conservation in Singapore.” Gardenwise: The Newsletter of the Singapore Botanic Gardens 8 (July 1999): 4–5, 4.

[25] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 121.

[26] Ibid., 1.

[27] Michelle McGrane, “David Cooke’s Work Horses,” Peony Moon, 2012, https://peonymoon.wordpress.com/tag/david-cooke-in-the-peradeniya-gardens/.

[28] Dhanesh Wisumperuma, “The Abandoned Attempt to Establish a Botanic Garden in Colombo, 1799,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 62, no. 2 (2017): 51–64, 52.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Arthur William Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 2 (1915): 185–240, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.31145, 214.

[31] Dhanesh Wisumperuma, “The Abandoned Attempt to Establish a Botanic Garden in Colombo, 1799,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 62, no. 2 (2017): 51–64, 54.

[32] Ibid., 55.

[33] Ibid., 61.

[34] Arthur William Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 2 (1915): 185–240, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.31145, 214.

[35] “Royal Botanic Gardens Peradeniya.” Department of National Botanic Gardens. Accessed December 20, 2023. https://www.botanicgardens.gov.lk/service/royal-botanic-gardens-peradeniya/.

[36] Ibid.

[37] “Peradeniya Botanic Gardens.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed December 20, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/place/Peradeniya-Botanic-Gardens.

[38] Siril Wijesundara, “Botanic Gardens in Sri Lanka; Past, Present and Future,” in Third Global Botanic Gardens Congress, 2016, 1–5, 1.

[39] Ibid., 4.

[40] Arthur William Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 2 (1915): 185–240, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.31145, 214.

[41] Virginia Woolf, Monday or Tuesday (Project Gutenberg, 2009), 86.

[42] Vibe Nielsen, “The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew,” Museum Management and Curatorship 38, no. 6 (2023): 696–712, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2269222, 696.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 2.

[45] Alan Paton, Kathy Willis, and Rhian Smith, “Launching the Science Collections Strategy 2018–2028,” Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, March 15, 2018, https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/launching-collections-strategy.

[46] Zaheer Baber, “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 46, no. 4 (May 25, 2016): 659–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2016.1185796, 696.

[47] Ibid., 696-697.

[48] Vibe Nielsen, “The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew,” Museum Management and Curatorship 38, no. 6 (2023): 696–712, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2269222, 700.

[49] Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 25 (1996): 265–92, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0188, 266.

[50] Arthur William Hill, “The History and Functions of Botanic Gardens,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 2 (1915): 185–240, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.31145, 209.

[51] Vibe Nielsen, “The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew,” Museum Management and Curatorship 38, no. 6 (2023): 696–712, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2269222, 698.

[52] Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Imperial Designs: Botanical Illustration and the British Botanic Empire,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 25 (1996): 265–92, https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2010.0188, 269.

[53] Vibe Nielsen, “The Colonial Roots of Botany – Legacies of Empire in the Botanic Gardens of Oxford and Kew,” Museum Management and Curatorship 38, no. 6 (2023): 696–712, https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2023.2269222, 707.

[54] Timothy P Barnard, Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 2.