Henarathgoda Botanical Ga

Henarathgoda Botanical Garden is one of the six botanical gardens in Sri Lanka. The botanical garden is situated in Gampaha-Minuwangoda main road, approximately 450 m away from Gampaha railway station. It is about 29 km from Sri Lanka's commercial capital of Colombo.

History

During the 19th Century British naturalists made various studies about Botany along with other sciences. One of their interests was the finding of possibility of establishing Rubber yeilding plants in Asia. They have used various Rubber yielding plants both in India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Some of them are Para Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), Gutta percha (Palaquium gutta), Panama Rubber (Castilea elastica), Balatta (Mimusops globesa) and Lagos (Funtumia elastica). The British naturalists concentrated their trials to Ceylon due to the failure of Rubber trials in India and discovered that Ceylon offers the same envirionmental condition as that of the Amazon.

1919 Rubber seedlings, collected from the Amazon forest, were imported from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and were planted at the Henerathgoda gardens in 1876. These Rubber plants were bloomed for the first time in 1881 and seeds obtained from it were exported to South India, Malaysia, and Myanmar. In 1919 the world first Rubber exhibition was held at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Peradeniya.

At these times the garden was laid out and handled by Muhandiram A. De Zoysa under the supervision of the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya. The first Rubber tree was collapsed due to rain storm in 1988 and the remainings were now preserved as a national monument of the country.

The Garden

The altitude of garden is about 33 feet above the sea level. It has a tropical low-country climate. The total area of the botanical garden is about 36 acres and recently it acquired another 7 acres for its expansion process.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henarathgoda_Botanical_Garden