Trifter

Photo taken by Jon Van Tango (Flickr)

Are you visiting Singapore? Welcome  to our tiny red dot.

Are you going to be here long? No? Just in transit? What a shame. There are lots to see and explore here. Well, never mind, there’s still some interesting places to see in one day. There’s the Singapore Zoological Garden, or if you want a relaxing stroll in the city, you can try our Botanical Gardens.

The Singapore Botanical Gardens is opened from 5 am to midnight daily, so you might just want to begin the day with the birds chirping and the sun rising over the trees.

Its history

An Agri-Horticultural Society founded one of the oldest gardens, if not the oldest in Singapore, the Singapore Botanical Gardens at its present site in 1859. It then evolved from a leisure and ornamental park under the Society, under which flower shows and horticultural fetes were organized, to having a scientific mission when the colonial government took over management and care of the Gardens in 1874. Kew-trained botanists and horticulturists were then sent to administer the Gardens.

The Gardens have gone through many stages of changes in its history due to its dedicated administrators or directors.

One of its most well-known directors was Mr Henry Nicholas Ridley who came in 1888.

Ridley was the man who introduced the rubber trees to the Malaya’s planters. He devised successful propagation methods and found a way to harvest commercial quantities of latex without harming or killing the trees during the 1890s and early 1900s.

His persistence persuasion of the Malaya’s plantation owners to grow rubber trees on a large scale was generally ignored until the early 1900s when their coffee plantations were devastated by disease and these plantation owners desperately needed a new cash crop. It was also at this time that the automobile industry boomed, resulting in an increased demand for rubber.

Due to Ridley’s foresight, the Singapore Botanical Gardens was ready when the rubber rush came. The Gardens had a ready source of seed supply since Ridley had turned the Gardens forest clearings and wasteland over to rubber plantation. The Gardens’ revenue multiplied as the region became a major market for the rubber trade and the plants at the Botanic Gardens became the basis for Southeast Asia’s rubber industry, an industry that generated fortunes.