Hakgala Botanical Gardens

Long before British botanist George Henry Kendrick Thwaites established a research garden here in 1861, this same hillside was already, according to the Ramayana, a very different kind of garden entirely, one where a captive princess waited for rescue among flowering Ashoka trees.

Ashok Vatika: A Prison Garden From the Ramayana

According to the Ramayana, when King Ravana of Lanka abducted Princess Sita, he held her not in a dungeon but in a pleasure garden called Ashok Vatika, described in the epic not as a place of confinement but as a serene grove filled with flowering Ashoka trees, streams and blossoms. Local tradition identifies this very site, in what was then known as Seetha Eliya, as that legendary garden, and it’s said to be where Hanuman first met Sita during his search for her, presenting Rama’s ring as a token of hope that rescue was coming. The nearby Seetha Amman Kovil, built to commemorate the spot where Sita is said to have prayed for Rama’s arrival, still stands as a place of pilgrimage today, cementing the area’s place on Sri Lanka’s broader Ramayana Trail.

A British Malaria Research Station

The garden’s documented, scientific history begins considerably later and far more prosaically, in 1861, when English botanist and entomologist Dr George Henry Kendrick Thwaites established it specifically to experiment with cinchona cultivation, the plant whose bark yields quinine, the primary treatment for malaria at the time. That research mission reflected genuine colonial-era medical urgency, malaria posed a serious threat to both local populations and European settlers across the tropics, and finding reliable cultivation methods for quinine’s source plant was a matter of considerable practical importance. The site was later also used to test tea cultivation, part of the broader wave of agricultural experimentation that swept the Hill Country following the collapse of Ceylon’s coffee industry.

Visiting Tips

• Allow around two hours for a proper walk through the garden’s various themed sections.
• Visit during March to May for the rose garden at its most spectacular.
• Combine with a visit to the nearby Seetha Amman Kovil for the fuller Ramayana-linked pilgrimage experience.
• The plant nursery closes earlier than the main garden (around 3:30 pm), so visit that section first if it interests you.

Two Histories, One Hillside

Hakgala’s appeal rests on an unusual double identity that few gardens anywhere can match: a site of deep mythological significance layered directly beneath a genuinely important piece of colonial-era medical and agricultural history. Visitors can walk the same hillside understood by some as a mythic prison garden from one of world literature’s oldest epics, and by others as a practical 19th-century laboratory in the fight against a disease that killed millions. Neither reading cancels out the other, and that willingness to hold both a sacred legend and a scientific research legacy on the same patch of ground is, in its own way, a distinctly Sri Lankan approach to layered history, one where old stories and colonial-era records sit comfortably side by side rather than competing for a single, definitive narrative.

Where It Sits on the Map

Frequently Asked Questions

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