Orchid House and plant houses, Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya

Peradeniya has a long royal history: King Wickramabahu III held court there in 1371, and the site became a royal garden under King Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, between 1747 and 1780 according to the Department of National Botanic Gardens. In 1821, six years after the final occupation of the Kandyan kingdom, Alexander Moon laid the groundwork for a botanic garden, then planted with coffee and cinnamon. The garden was formally established in 1843 with plants brought in particular from Kew.

A line of superintendents developed it: George Gardner from 1844, George Henry Kendrick Thwaites from 1849 to 1879, Henry Trimen until 1895, then John Christopher Willis, director from 1898 to 1912. In that year the garden came under the Department of Agriculture. During the Second World War, Lord Louis Mountbatten, supreme commander of the Allied forces, set up the headquarters of South East Asia Command there.

The sources consulted do not date the building of the Orchid House or of the neighbouring plant houses; they present them as established features of today's garden, run by the Department of National Botanic Gardens.

The Orchid House stands near the Flower Garden, within a small group of plant houses: the Cactus House and the Plant House lie a few dozen metres away, so that the three collections — orchids, succulents and potted shade plants — can be seen together. Close by, the fernery has been laid out as a landscaped garden crossed by intersecting paths.

The garden covers 59 hectares at about 460 m above sea level, in a loop of the Mahaweli, which surrounds it on every side except the south. The sources consulted describe neither the materials nor the dimensions of these plant houses and name no designer: their interest lies above all in the collections they shelter, set at the heart of the visitors' route.

The Orchid House displays exotic blooms of the genera Cattleya, Dendrobium, Arachnis, Oncidium, Phalaenopsis and Vanda, along with their hybrids. Among the hardiest tropical orchids are Grammatophyllum speciosum, the largest orchid in the world, whose flower spikes reach 2.5 m, and Coelogyne meyeriana, the "green orchid".

The Cactus House holds more than 800 specimens — aloes, agaves, Opuntia, Cereus, Rebutia, Rhipsalis — while the Plant House grows ferns, begonias, African violets, Episcia, Dieffenbachia, Calathea, Philodendron, bromeliads and Anthurium. The nearby fernery gathers about a hundred native and exotic species. Across the whole garden the collections exceed 4,000 species.

The garden, near Kandy, received some 1.2 million Sri Lankan and 400,000 foreign visitors in 2016. The Orchid House and its neighbours combine with the park's great landmarks: the Great Lawn with its Java figs, the cannonball tree planted in 1901 by the future King George V and Queen Mary, the avenues of royal palms and palmyra palms, and the spice garden — cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, nutmeg — where some trees were planted in 1840. The park also served as a location for the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai.