Perdana Botanical Gardens

All around you are the Perdana Botanical Gardens, where walking paths stand alongside scientific work: staff collect herbarium specimens, mark old trees on a map, and maintain themed collections. The lake is visible below, and among the plantings are an African baobab, a Madagascar bottle tree, and a rainbow eucalyptus. The garden preserves the memory of a time when this part of the city was arranged very differently.

Laman Perdana is an open space in the center of the garden, adapted for celebrations, filming, and crowded events. The undulating canopy above it was completed in two thousand fourteen. The architects raised a single-layer steel shell on branching supports: the roof touches the ground at only a few points and leaves an almost unobstructed space beneath it.

In eighteen eighty-eight, there was neither a plaza nor a lake here. Sungei Bras Bras wound through a swampy valley on the outskirts of the young mining town. Alfred Reid Venning, the treasurer of Selangor, pressed for the creation of Kuala Lumpur's first large garden. He had previously made his living as a planter in Ceylon, and now he was responsible for public funds. He was promised only a small state subsidy to transform the swamp.

Venning brought the British resident Frank Swettenham to the valley, as Swettenham needed to approve the expenditure. They inspected the site, after which Swettenham received permission to allocate funds. Venning laid out one hundred seventy-three acres for walking paths, plantings, a lake, and an experimental garden where useful plants were to be tested. Under his plan, Sungei Bras Bras was dammed. This created an artificial lake named Sydney, after Swettenham's wife.

There was still not enough money for a quick opening. Chow Ah Yok, a merchant and one of the leaders of the city's Cantonese community, supported the plantings and gave the garden one hundred trees—white-flowering champaka trees and orange trees. As early as May thirteenth, eighteen eighty-nine, Governor Cecil Clementi Smith officially opened the lake and the garden. It took almost ten years to lay out the grounds completely.

Sources describe the first visitors as the colonial elite. A year later, Venning also set aside part of the shore for the Lake Club, which admitted only Europeans. He himself continued to lead the garden committee until his departure in nineteen oh seven. Then, in his honor, a commemorative tree was planted here with a plaque stating that Venning had created the lake and tended the garden from the very beginning. The road through the park was named Venning Road; it is now Jalan Perdana.

The name “Perdana” first appeared on the garden itself in nineteen seventy-five, when Tun Abdul Razak Hussein reopened the renovated park. Urban planners explained the choice by its proximity to his residence, where the already familiar memorial now stands. In two thousand eleven, the word “Lake” was removed from the name, and the former walking park was declared a botanical garden. A herbarium appeared here: staff collect and store specimens for research, map old trees, and maintain themed collections.

Among the plantings near Laman Perdana are an African baobab, a Madagascar bottle tree, a rainbow eucalyptus, and trimmed kesinai trees—one of them was placed on the garden's emblem. Below remains the lake for which Venning once brought Swettenham to the swampy valley of Sungei Bras Bras.