Singapore Botanic Gardens

This guide to Singapore Botanic Gardens centers on Henry Ridley, who became director in 1888 obsessed with an idea nobody around him would entertain: that the rubber tree growing quietly on these grounds could remake the region's economy. Coffee planters dismissed him as Mad Ridley, but he kept pressing seeds on anyone who would take them and worked out a bark-cutting technique still used today. The guide also traces the gardens' own older history, laid out in 1859 on a former nutmeg plantation by the Agri-Horticultural Society.