Pamplemousses
"A plant with leaves wide enough to lie down on — and they told me some people have."
The SSR Botanical Garden opens at six in the morning, and I arrived at six-fifteen with the garden almost entirely to myself. The light at that hour came horizontally through the palms and hit the lily pond in a way that turned the water amber underneath the giant pads. Victoria amazonica — the royal water lily, imported from the Amazon in the nineteenth century — spreads its dinner-plate-sized leaves across the surface with the unhurried authority of a plant that has been growing here for more than a century and intends to keep doing so. The largest pads are a metre and a half across. The flowers open at dusk and close by morning, and they change colour as they age — white on the first night, pink on the second. I arrived too late for the flowers but stayed long enough for the light.
Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden, named for Mauritius’s first prime minister and one of the oldest botanical gardens in the southern hemisphere, covers twenty-five hectares in the north of the island, on the former site of a French colonial estate. The original garden was laid out in 1770 by Pierre Poivre, the French botanist who smuggled cloves and nutmeg out of the Dutch-controlled Spice Islands and helped break the Dutch monopoly on those spices — a small act of botanical espionage that changed the flavour of cooking across the globe. His original design is still legible in the garden’s structure: the double avenue of royal palms that forms the main approach, the pond, the formal planting beds.
The tortoises arrived with me — or rather I arrived to find them already occupying the path, two Aldabra giant tortoises moving toward the water trough with the implacable momentum of very large, very old animals that have no reason to deviate from their route. The larger one was estimated to be over a hundred years old. He regarded me without interest and continued. I stepped aside. Later I found a third tortoise motionless under a palm, so still that it looked like a large decorative rock until it blinked.
Beyond the water lily pond, the garden holds plant collections that chart the history of colonial agriculture in the Indian Ocean — spice trees (nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves), palms from across the tropical world, a collection of endemic Mauritian species, a talipot palm that flowers only once in its lifetime, after sixty to eighty years, and then dies. The talipot I found was flowering, surrounded by a small fence and a sign in French explaining what it was doing. Three tourists stood before it with their phones. I understood their impulse — a tree that waits sixty years to do one thing, and this is the moment — but I preferred to look at it without a screen between us.
The village of Pamplemousses itself is a quiet northern settlement, its name derived from the old French word for grapefruit — the fruit that grew abundantly when the Dutch first settled the area. Outside the garden gates, a few vendors sell fresh fruit and cold drinks, and a man with a bicycle asked if I wanted a guided tour of the village. I said I would think about it and walked in the other direction, through streets where the sugarcane fields come right up to the backs of the houses.
When to go: The botanical garden is best visited in the early morning, before the coach tours arrive around nine. The water lilies are in their best condition during the cooler months of May through October. The garden is open daily and the entry fee is minimal — one of the better-value hours you will spend on the island.