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Within a year of its establishment in 1822, the botanic garden in Singapore had grown to occupy the 19 hectares of land that Raffles had allocated, cultivating crops such as nutmeg, cocoa and cloves. This effort followed the long-established British tradition of setting up botanic gardens in its colonies to experiment with growing commercially valuable crops and for the study of native plants. According to Wallich, the garden was set up for the “experimental cultivation of the indigenous plants of Singapore”. Raffles allocated a “most advantageous site”, as he put it, on Government Hill (now Fort Canning Hill), for the new garden. The garden was the brainchild of Raffles and the Danish surgeon and naturalist Nathaniel Wallich, who had previously been Superintendent of the Royal Gardens in Calcutta, India. Just a few years after Stamford Raffles landed on Singapore’s shores in 1819, the British took steps to set up a botanic garden.

While the “Garden City” vision only dates back five decades, the practice of creating gardens and parks as well as the planting of trees in the city is something that goes back some 200 years. Over time, that vision evolved from “Garden City” to “City in a Garden” and the current “City in Nature”, which is part of the larger environmental sustainability Singapore Green Plan 2030. The current greening efforts can be traced to 1967 when then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew introduced the “Garden City” vision. Singapore is justly known for its tree-lined streets, its colourful roadside flowers and the abundance of parks in the city centre and in housing estates.

Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). It was built in the 1970s on reclaimed land. A panoramic shot of East Coast Park taken in 2016, one of Singapore’s biggest parks.

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