58. A Visit to the Kebun Raya Bali Botanical Garden
A Garden Travel Vlog to the oldest Botanical Garden in Indonesia
Hey everyone, currently melting through the heatwave in Amsterdam. Nico and I just closed on our new home so excuse the sporadic element of my newsletters as of late, life has accelerated. I hope any North American readers are safe from all the wildfires that have been going down recently <3 Hopefully I can distract you with a little garden travel tale….
In the midst of another heatwave (oh wait Bali is always that hot - god I am embarrassingly Canadian), during our visit to the Kebun Raya Bali Botanical Garden, Nico and I drove through streets filled with the most incredible nurseries I’d ever seen. Stacks of tropicals all along the roads:
If you want to see more roadside photographs of all the plant shopfronts on the drive to the botanical gardens, you can click below <3
The Bali Botanical Garden is the oldest official Botanical Garden in Indonesia. It first opened in the 1950s, intending on solely specialising in conifer plants and to bring the community together. Over the years it’s role shifted and it had to take a short break between 1965-1975 due to the rocky political climate on the island. Nowadays it sprawls across 157.5 hectares, 2,400 plant species, and has started to focus on conservation of indigenous Eastern Indonesian plants.
A large statue of Kumbakarna Laga, a character from the Hindu Epic Rāmāyaṇa guards the entranceway.
Due to its intimidating size, at the entrance you can rent a variety of transport methods. If we were to redo our trip, I would go for a golf cart type situation. Instead we went for the non-electric bikes, because we thought we could handle it. But no, the hills are high and seem even steeper when overheating. Thank god for Nico pushing our bikes up the hills while I trudged along behind him.
We spent a lot of our time hovering below the giant ficus tree and in the bamboo forest to stay cool. There is also an incredible view of Bratan Lake, where the gardens can arrange for you to have a nice picnic, if you are in the mood for that.
If you’re traveling in the area, similar to the Blooms Gardens, you can also stay on-site at Kebun Raya. You can learn more about that here.
Perhaps in part due to covid, research being conducted, and/or the rainy off-season - certain sections were roped off. Nico and I explored as much as we could before I tapped out from the heat and bought all the fruit for sale in the parking lot.
Here is a super mellow biking tour through the gardens, sorry a lot of the clips are in portrait. I’ll get there, mainly just fucking around, editing on CapCut at this point.
When snapping the above photos of the roadside plant nurseries, I also accidentally took these cute photos….
In case you missed my updates from the 2023 Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London in last week’s newsletter, you can catch up here.
Thank you so much for being here <3 I’ll see you next time for a visit to another epic Botanical Garden - The Royal Botanic Kew Gardens outside London. Have a wonderful week!
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