William Warren - Balinese Gardens

Gardens of Eden

'The morning of the world" was how Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India described Bali when he came as an official guest in the 1950s. To an earlier visitor, the American Hickman Powell, it was "the last paradise"; to others, a tropical Shangri-La, a refuge from worldly confusion, the very embodiment of a thousand tempting fantasies.

Bali has long exerted this peculiar power to seduce and stir the romantic imagination, not only among travellers fortunate enough to have beheld its charms with their own eyes, but also among a far greater number whose dreams derived from little more than its magically evocative name or through faded pictures in old National Geographic magazines. An important part of the allure, both in the past and today, is the island's omnipresent creativity and the richly complex culture of its people. "Everybody in Bali seems to be an artist," commented the painter Miguel Covarrubias. Another part of the appeal, equally strong, arises from the sheer physical beauty of the place.

"It takes a little time," as a newcomer to the tropics once wrote, "for the temperate mind to accept the palm-tree as a common, natural, and inevitable object in every outlook and landscape." A similar sense of botanical revelation occurs on any drive through Bali away from its few large towns. Along the coasts, coconut palms by the thousands form a permanent skyline of graceful fronds stirring in languid sea breezes, while elsewhere, huge Ficus trees wrap their roots around mossy walls, wild-looking jungles spill dramatically down picturesque ravines to streams and rivers, and tree ferns rise elegantly beside cool, shimmering lakes that adorn the craters of ancient volcanoes. In more settled places, a glimpse through the gateway of even the smallest courtyard reveals a riot of flowering shrubs and creepers, seemingly growing at random and clearly without much effort. There is a feeling of space, of Eden-like abundance, of moving through a vast but interconnected garden where every conceivable variation of green is on permanent display, from palest lime to purest emerald, accented here and there with a startling burst of colour.