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This guide to the Tropical Spice Garden on Penang Island opens in 1794 with a young Kew-trained botanist, Christopher Smith, arriving in George Town on an assignment that could get him killed: smuggling nutmeg and clove seedlings past a Dutch monopoly guarded for two centuries. It follows his decade combing the Malay Archipelago and his strange fate after finally sailing home, then jumps two centuries ahead to a British couple, David and Rebecca Wilkinson, clearing eight acres of abandoned rubber plantation on this hillside above the Andaman Sea. Look for their old colonial house, still standing half swallowed by the garden they planted around it.