Taman Tugu

This guide to Taman Tugu in Kuala Lumpur starts with an unlikely detail among the canopy: oil palms planted as garden ornaments by British colonial officers who lived on this hill in the 1930s. It follows the site through decades of abandonment after the 1970s, when the bungalows emptied and the forest filled with dumped construction waste, and into the years before 2018, when Khazanah and the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia set out to save what remained. Look for the labeled trees along the trails as you walk, each marking a small piece of that repair.