Giant Java Fig of the Great Lawn

This is the same species people keep in a pot by the window, grown until one tree shades somewhere between 1,600 and 2,500 square metres of lawn. The figure depends on who did the measuring. A 1988 encyclopedia piece gave about 1,600, a blogger about 2,420, and a Sunday Observer garden writer about 2,500, describing it as a giant living umbrella. It is a weeping fig, Ficus benjamina, known in Sri Lanka as the Java fig or Java willow, and it stands in the middle of the Great Lawn of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, near Monument Road. The gardens themselves go back to groundwork in 1821 and were formally established in 1843, on 147 acres just outside Kandy. Its own age is less certain than its size. Travel pieces put it at around 160 years, and older writing calls it a century old, but no garden record of when this tree went in has surfaced. More than a hundred years is the safe statement. If the Department of National Botanic Gardens has the planting date, we would like to hear it. It has been a sight for a long time. Mary Binney Wheeler photographed it on a colour slide in 1982, now in the University of Pennsylvania's library, and it is still the crown everyone on the lawn walks towards. Entry to the gardens is paid. Peradeniya is about 6 kilometres west of Kandy, around 20 minutes by bus or tuk-tuk, or by train to Peradeniya Junction.