Gardens of Sri Lanka

248 pages

The history of gardens and the art of garden design have largely been confined to the finest European and American examples, from Rome to the Renaissance and to the 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, it seems particularly interesting to delve into the more than 2,000-year‑old garden tradition of Sri Lanka, a country where the relatively new field of garden archaeology had its beginnings in the 1940s. Sri Lanka, in fact, has some of the oldest surviving gardens in the world, so unique that they are now World Heritage Sites, and several examples of which match in their antiquity the Roman garden remains of the Mediterranean region.
Here, the ancient tradition of Buddhist and royal gardens is to be found at many ancient and historic sites, while a living heritage of garden design provides a distinctive example of historical continuity, paralleled only in a few other countries, such as Italy. Some of the earliest Sri Lankan gardens date to the 3rd century BCE, like the Boulder Gardens in Buddhist rock-shelter monastery complexes and yet others, such as Dambulla, have continued as living monuments to the present day. The elaborate, 5th-century royal garden complex at Sigiriya is one of the earliest surviving grand jardins, matching in scale and archaeological complexity the illustrious examples of Pasargad, Tivoli or Versailles. Moving closer to our times, the early 18th-century urban and lakeside landscapes of the royal city of Kandy are the last witnesses of the precolonial civilisation. The colonial encounter brought new European influences, while the designs associated with the 20th-century Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa and others are a conscious expression of a living organic tradition of garden art that can be seen throughout the country.
This highly illustrated book seeks to cover this 2,000-year history, with its continuity and variety, offering a significant contribution to the ever-widening global framework of garden history and garden archaeology in the 21st century.