Rambling in the Outer Gardens Podcast By cover art

Rambling in the Outer Gardens

Rambling in the Outer Gardens

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 This episode is dedicated to the sprawling plantation gardens that disappear off into the jungle around Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This longer of two walks, which we call THE ESTATE WALK, starts at THE PODI PATH just outside the front porch that leads into the hotel. A traditional kitchen constructed of mud and bamboo once stood on this path, managed by Podemenike whose life roughly and remarkably followed that of independent Sri Lanka. Around 1950 she began work on the estate as a lady’s maid. It was just a few years after independence – and she stayed on to help protect the estate once the family fled after the 1987 JVP Uprising. This violent Marxist-Leninist insurrection almost toppled the then government of President Premadasa. For over two years a state of near anarchy dominated life, with militant riots, mass executions, and assassinations affecting most areas of the island. Pro and anti-government militias added to the battle, the causalities of which, Human Rights Watch eventually estimated at 35,000 – a figure no sides yet agree on. It wasn’t the first such uprising. In 1971 a similar insurrection occurred, this time against the Bandaranaike government, though its fatalities were considered to be less. But the 1987 rebellion was the first truly island wide event that deeply affected the estate, causing it to be abandoned by all except Podemenike and two elderly croppers, understandably fond of arrack. It was a terrible time for the country and although Podemenike’s kitchen has long since gone, as you walk down this little path, you may, at least in your imagination, still catch the smell of real village cooking - warm spices and buttery rice. THE PODI PATH cuts through a pepper plantation, arriving soon at a flight of steps on the left just before THE SPICE KITCHEN. Herein lies the entrance to THE KITCHEN GARDEN, with two special trees coming into touch on the right. The first of these is a Cannonball Tree or Sal Tree. This is a mighty and magnificent wonder, with pink white architectural flowers like half open lids that give off one of the most perfumed and refined scents you are ever lightly to encounter on this good earth. It grows to over one hundred feet and the flowers eventually turn into seeds the size of cannonballs that hang off the main stems of the tree like a wayward artillery store. The tree comes from South America and is the source of adamantly held confusions. Buddhists believe that Lord Buddha was born in a garden of sal trees in Lumbini in distant Nepal. But the Cannonball or Sal tree growing in Sri Lanka only arrived in South Asia in the 1880s. The first one to have a detailed record is that in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, planted in on the 14th of April 1901 by Geroge V and his alarming wife, Queen Mary. Given the extreme botanical spectacle that this tree is, it is no surprise that it has come to be conflated with the sal Lord Buddha would have known – shorea robusta, a smaller tree with little flowers and no fragrance. I hesitate to boast and brag, but the inventible conclusion from comparing our Cannonball Tree with King George’s is that our, being much larger, must predate 1901. Beside it is what looks like Breadfruit tree. Or possibly a jacktree? Actually, it is both – a rare hybridising that occurred entirely naturally between these related species. The relationship coach, Laura Doyle, famed, at least in California for her trademarked “Six Intimacy Skills,” remarked that “Only God is perfect. For the rest of us, there are apologies.” And so it is for our Kitchen Garden. Invaded nightly by hungry porcupines; several times by a small herd of 20 wild boar, and often at the mercy of deer, squirrels, and monkeys, it is a wonder it ever produces any herbs or vegetables. Even so, we limp on, brave as Obi-Wan Kenobi, planting organic wonders that will flourish all the better once we finally get around to fencing in the entire acre. The happier plants grow in a large greenhouse, mostly soft vegetables, and herbs. The area is surrounded by shade nurseries, home to hundreds of hand reared trees, destined for timber plantations or our rare trees arboretum. Returning back to the steps up which you first came to enter the kitchen garden you then pass, on your left THE SPICE KITCHEN. This modest building was made in the traditional way as a Pandemic project in 2021 by our whole team, using bamboo, mud, and leftovers. It is the place for staff teas and lunches, and a creche. Part of the building is used to process latex, the raw white juice extracted from the estate rubber trees that is then half dried and rolled on machinery made in Wolverhampton in the 1940s. At the building’s end is another flight of steps, this one leading up into THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN. The path through the spice garden is circular, eventually returning you back to this point. And now you are in the Estate’s ...
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