Trip to Singapore Botanical Gardens

1. Trip to Singapore Botanical Gardens Done by: Muhammad Dhafer BMFKS, Silas Yeo, Low Lixon

2. Content • Introduction • Basic Information • Where? • What

3. Introduction Hi National Geographicers. Dhafer, Silas and Lixon here! On 19 of May we went to yet another green destination managed by NParks, the Botanical Gardens. . The Botanical Gardens was a great garden beatified with many trees and flowers. Well it was fun experience looking at the different species of plants there so here it is for you to see! A sign on the gate of Botanical Gardens

4. Basic Information Now to start with the tour some basic info about the Botanical Gardens. A clock tower at the entrance of Botanical Garden

5. Where The garden is bordered by Holland Road and Napier Road to the south, Cluny Road to the east, Tyersall Avenue and Cluny Park Road to the west and Bukit Timah Road to the North. The linear distance between the northern and southern ends is around 2.5 km (1.5 miles). Location of Botanical Gardens ( Coloured in green)

6. What The Singapore Botanic Gardens is a 74 hectare garden in Singapore. It is managed by NParks the statutory board which manages most parks in Singapore. Its size is twice larger compared to the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew and is also about a fifth the size of Central Park in New York. It is the only botanical garden in the world that opens from 5 a.m. to midnight daily. For visitors, the Botanical Garden does not charge an admission fee except for the National Orchid Garden. The botanic gardens is separated to three cores, Bukit Timah, Tanglin and Central core

7. Logos These are the logos of Botanical Garden and NParks

8. Species

9. History The first "Botanical and Experimental Garden" in Singapore was established in 1822 on Government Hill at Fort Canning by Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore . The Garden's main task was to evaluate for cultivation crops which include those yielding fruits, vegetables, spices and other raw materials. This Garden closed in 1829 until 30 years later that the present Singapore Botanic Gardens began in 1859, when the Agri Horticultural Society was granted 32 hectares of land in Tanglin by the colonial government, which was from the merchant Hoo Ah Kay, known as Whampoa.

10. Directors – Laurence Niven Laurence Niven was hired as superintendent and landscape designer to turn what were essentially overgrown plantations and a tangle of virgin rainforest into a public park. The layout of the Gardens as it is today is largely based on Niven's design. The Agri Horticultural Society, however, ran out of funds and, in 1874, the colonial government took over the management of the Gardens.

11. Henry Nicholas Ridley The first rubber seedlings came to the gardens from Kew in 1877. A naturalist, Henry Nicholas Ridley, or Mad Ridley as he was known, became director of the gardens in 1888 and spearheaded rubber cultivation. Successful in his experiments with rubber planting, Ridley convinced planters across Malaya to adopt his methods. The results were astounding; Malaya became the world's number one producer and exporter of natural rubber.

12. Eric Holttum Another achievement was the pioneering of orchid hybridisation by Professor Eric Holttum, director of the Gardens from 1925 to 1949. His techniques led to Singapore being one of the world's top centres of commercial orchid growing. Today it also has the largest collection of tropical plant specimens.

13. Kwan Koriba During the Japanese occupation of Singapore from 1942 to 1945, Hidezo Tanakadate a professor of geology, took over control of the Singapore Botanic Gardens and the Raffles Museum. The Gardens was also renamed as Shōnan Botanic Gardens. Later that year, Dr. Kwan Koriba, a retired professor of botany from the Imperial University of Tokyo, arrived as Director of the Gardens, a post he held until the end of the war.

14. Murray Ross Henderson After the war, the Gardens was handed back to the control of the British. Murray Ross Henderson, curator of the Herbarium before the war, succeeded Holttum as director from 1949 to 1954. Eventually the Gardens played an important role during the "greening Singapore" campaign and Garden City campaign during the early independence years.