From the hotel room I look across at the old botanical garden. I am intrigued by use of the word ‘old’ in the naming. Did it mean that it was the abandoned garden like the old pair of shoes, tossed aside, replaced by the new? From my room I have the impression this is the case and that somewhere there is a new botanical garden— which interests me less.
When I enter the garden I realise my suspicions are correct. Weeds sprout along the edge of the path, the grassed areas are unkempt. As I weave my way to the top, (the garden is on a small hill) I see remnants from when it was the botanical garden; name tags pinned to the trees, a small glass house, which is almost empty, a bamboo forest. There are two areas with demarcated garden beds. In one the beds are being overrun into a dense carpet of green, and in the other they are baked dry from lack of water with the plants running to seed.
I can’t help liking this place, because perhaps it represents a future time beyond the rampant, obsessive plant and object collecting, counting and cataloguing of our European colonial past.
