Lalbagh

In 1760 Nawab Haidar Ali Khan ordered a garden laid out at Bangalore — some thirty-odd acres of square parterres cut by paths of fruit trees, cypresses framing the rose beds, a tank to water it. The model was the Mughal charbagh crossed with the French gardens at Pondicherry, and the name it took, Lal Bagh, the red garden, is usually explained by the roses.

It is worth registering the date. The East India Company did not establish its own botanic garden at Calcutta until 1787, twenty-seven years later. The first serious botanical garden in the subcontinent was built by a man the British would spend four wars trying to destroy, and by the son who inherited it.

Haidar Ali built a pleasure garden and stocked it largely from India. Tipu Sultan extended the ground and changed its purpose. Under him Lalbagh became something closer to an experimental station, organised in three kinds of nursery: one for agriculture, one for garden crops, one for aromatic and ornamental plants. The object was not display. It was to find out what would grow in Mysore.

That fits everything else known about how he ran the state. The same reign that established twenty-one silkworm stations with their mulberry plantations, that pushed higher-yielding rice, that put state capital behind manufacture — that state treated a garden as infrastructure. Sandalwood, pepper, cardamom and silk were the commodities Mysore sold to the world. Anything that widened that list was worth the freight.

This is the part that connects the garden to everything else on this site. Tipu Sultan's embassies are usually read as a search for alliances, and they were. They were also procurement missions, and the shopping list was explicit.

The instructions for the 1788 embassy to Louis XVI asked the French king for engineers, artisans, makers of glass, clocks and porcelain — and for gardeners. The envoys came back with gardeners, an engineer, a clockmaker, and seeds and bulbs from the Jardin du Roi in Paris, the royal botanical garden that would shortly be renamed the Jardin des Plantes.

A later embassy to the French colony at Mauritius produced the detail that says most about how seriously this was taken: twenty chests of plants and seeds, together with clove and nutmeg trees that took eighty men to carry up from the port at Mangalore and over the Western Ghats. Clove and nutmeg were then a Dutch monopoly of the Spice Islands, among the most jealously guarded plants on earth. Getting living trees to Bangalore was not gardening. It was an attempt to break somebody else's monopoly by growing the plant at home.

Stock came from further afield still. Contemporary accounts of the garden's sources name Persia, Kabul, Lahore and Multan, Turkey, Mauritius, France, and the Cape of Good Hope — pine and oak from the Cape among them. The gardeners who kept it were drawn from the Thigala community, whose descendants were still working Bangalore's market gardens generations later.

Set beside the rest of the reign, the logic is consistent. Mysore was a state trying to hold off a commercial empire, and the empire's instrument was control of what moved and what it cost. Tipu Sultan answered that everywhere he could: state factories, state trading houses, embassies hunting for artisans and technique, his own workshops building what he was not permitted to buy.

A botanical garden is that same policy in slower form. If the spice you need is a monopoly, grow it. If the crop yields badly, find a better strain. If the technique lives in someone's hands, ask for the gardener as well as the seed — which is exactly what the letter to Louis XVI did. The British, who understood this thinking perfectly well because it was also their own, built Kew and Calcutta on the same principle and moved rubber, tea and cinchona around the world with it.

The army took the garden in 1799 along with everything else. A British officer restocked it with European and Chinese plants; it passed to the Madras Presidency, was neglected for decades, and was then revived from the 1850s by the Kew-trained superintendent William New, who brought in plantings from China, South Africa and the Indian Ocean and laid the avenues. The Glass House, modelled on the Crystal Palace, went up in 1889. Later superintendents — John Cameron, and after him Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel — made it the botanical centre of southern India.

The result is an odd kind of survival. Almost nothing else Tipu Sultan built is still doing the job he built it for: the forts are monuments, the arsenals are ruins, the state was dismantled inside a year. Lalbagh is still a botanical garden, still collecting, and still open to the city — as it goes on being, on ground chosen by his father, for a purpose he set.