The Gardens: That is how many locals refer to them. Just The Gardens. As if there were no other, as Bonnie Tinsley wrote in "Visions of Delight."
There are none, in truth, quite like Singapore's Botanic Gardens, though Sri Lanka's Peradeniya Gardens come close.
Covering 47 hectares in the Tanglin district, their first director was Henry Nathaniel Ridley, a mustachioed, hyperenergetic Briton with piercing eyes and a keen interest in everything from theosophy to rhinoceros beetles. Ridley added 50,000 specimens to the Gardens. He also had a thing about rubber. He would carry seeds with him to social events and press them on fellow guests. "Mad Ridley," they called him derisively, or "Rubber Ridley."