The Garden of the Gods; a Sri Lankan folk tale that transcends myth

The Horton Plains, when the Garden of the Gods appears once in twelve years.

They say twelve years is a single day in the realm of gods. In a Sri Lankan folk tale, when a young celestial being fell in love with an earthly woman, this strange time-dilation became the premise of his heartbreak. In this story, we share the folktale The Garden of the Gods and how it entwines with reality in a natural phenomenon that takes place every twelve years.

In the highlands of the island, there was a village girl of great beauty. Every few days, she went into the forest to gather firewood. Her elders said to her, “Do not tarry; the forest is not a place to linger; return quickly, that you may assist your sister.” 

But the girl loved the forest. She gazed long upon the trees, and she wandered about seeking flowers.

At that time, a young god came down to the Earth. When the god beheld the maiden, he desired to draw near to her. Seeing that she was pleased at the sight of wild flowers, the god thought, “By flowers shall I keep her here for a long time.”

Then the god took the heavenly blossoms from the garland that he wore, and scattered them upon the hills and plains. Straightaway, those heavenly flowers spread out upon the earth, covering it in colours brighter than any flowers of this world. The green of the highland forest became a garden of the gods.

When the maiden came to gather wood, she saw the countless flowers, and her heart was filled with wonder. She forgot her household tasks and wandered long in the garden of the gods. 

Then the god took the form of a young man, fair to see, and he drew near to her. He spoke kindly, and she was pleased. At parting, he said, “I will return on the morrow. In this garden, we shall meet again.” 

But one day among the gods is twelve years on earth. Thus, though the maiden waited through days and through months, the god did not appear. At length she thought, “That day in the heavenly garden was but a dream,” and she gave it no more heed.

Yet the god was true to his word. On the morrow of the gods, after twelve earthly years, he came again to the highlands. The garden of the gods sprang forth upon the hills and the plains, in colours and in beauty without measure.

To this day, every twelfth year, the hills are clothed in blossoms, and the divine garden reappears on earth. There the young god waits, ever hopeful, for his earthly love.

Thus it is said: the garden of the gods still appears and vanishes, not to be possessed by human nor deity. To desire beauty is human, even divine. But to seek to possess it is folly.

Folk tales are often dismissed as stories unworthy of documentation. They rarely entered libraries until anthropologists, scholars, and revered intellectuals like Carl Jung began to expose their depth as tales springing from universal symbols common to humankind and the reservoirs of our collective unconscious. This story, The Garden of the Gods, not only draws from that shared well of wisdom, but it also entwines with a vivid natural phenomenon that takes place with uncanny resemblance to the folk tale. 

This happens in Sri Lanka’s world heritage site, Horton Plains, in the central highlands, where the tale is said to originate. Here, every twelve years, Strobilanthes species erupt in a synchronized mass flowering that transforms the highlands into a spectacle still described by locals as ‘the garden of the gods.’ As many as 33 Strobilanthes species take part, with at least 30 endemic, some critically endangered.

Strobilanthes kunthiana is one of the endangered species that takes part in the synchronized flowering. The mass flowering gives the Strobilanthes species a better chance at pollinating and surviving predators.

Folk tales usually spring up as unremarkably as wildflowers and disappear without getting recorded. They were transmitted by grandparents charged with containing restless children through stories, so that afternoons in households could remain sane. Sometimes those children retold the tales when they grew older, but most slipped quietly out of memory, especially as oral traditions changed. Rarely were they written down, unless an anthropologist or occasional story-keeper stumbled upon one too remarkable to let vanish; too wondrous to be forgotten.

This folk tale sparked lifelong wonder in those who first heard the story as children, only to later see it come true across the Horton Plains: myth confirmed by nature, wonder given form. For those alive when botanists explained the twelve-year flowering cycle of Strobilanthes in the 20th century, the awe deepened further with science and story converging. The tale will stir still more wonder for future generations who may never see all 33 species bloom again across Sri Lanka’s highlands, as many now hover on the edge of extinction.

Stories are timeless vessels of wonder. They are not escapes from reality but frames through which reality reveals itself. The Garden of the Gods is one such frame. It's a folk tale that carries—through myth, ecology, loss, and longing—the truth that beauty cannot be possessed. This is how stories distill truth into forms that are more accessible, memorable, and enduring. 

The Mango (Part 2): a fruit carried by trade winds, power, and persistence

How South Asia’s iconic fruit left home and entered global culture

In Part 1 of our story on the mango, we discussed how this fruit was part of South Asian lives for centuries, and remains to stay so. If in South Asia the mango was a metaphor for life's richest ties—myth, memory, friendship—then it was only a matter of time before it became a story the world would carry, reshape, and consume.

circa 1765, Women Enjoying the River at the Forest's Edge, Hunhar II

Colonization, trade, and diplomacy during the early modern era (1500s onwards) uprooted not only goods exchange but also food and farming practices. Along the humid trade routes of the East India Companies, among the many treasures from the East, mangoes travelled. Seeds carefully packed for colonial gardens, descriptions of their ‘luscious flesh’ written into ship journals and diplomatic letters. By the 17th century, mango trees bloomed in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil, while mangoes themselves acquired new roles—not as sacred symbols, but as exotic commodities and markers of wealth or influence.

1891, Mango, from the Fruits series (N12) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands commercial colour lithograph, Allen & Ginter and Geo. S. Harris and Sons.

One of the most surreal twists that placed the mango as a symbol of Maoist reforms came about in 1968, during a period of intense political upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Arshad Hussain gifted a crate of Pakistani mangoes to Chairman Mao Zedong. At that time, mangoes were an exotic rarity in China, and Mao himself wasn’t particularly interested in them—he didn't even eat them—but in a gesture both practical and symbolic, he re-gifted the mangoes to the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, factory workers who had helped suppress the violent student factions at Tsinghua University. The workers, unfamiliar with the fruit, interpreted it as a profound token of Mao’s personal gratitude and divine favour. Mangoes were paraded, sealed in wax, displayed in glass cases, and even boiled into water that workers ceremonially drank. The mango became a quasi-sacred object, and 'mango worship' swept across China as a unique (and strange) manifestation of the Cultural Revolution’s devotion culture.

Exhibit in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon - Eugene, Oregon, USA.

Later, replicas of mangoes were mass-produced in wax and porcelain, and mango-themed items flooded Chinese markets—from bedsheets to enamelware. Though the ‘mango cult’ eventually faded, it left a lasting imprint on Chinese cultural memory: a tropical fruit, once symbolizing abundance and sweetness in South Asia, had been reframed into a divine emblem of political loyalty halfway across the world.

Yet even as the mango became imbued with the symbolism of different empires, its imagery persisted and evolved.

mid-17th century, Mango-Shaped Flask, Islamic Art, Met Museum

The distinctive mango shape, which had flourished for centuries in South Asian textiles, jewelry, and folk art, was exported along with fabrics. Through contact with Persian and Kashmiri artisans, the mango motif was stylized into the now-famous paisley pattern—a teardrop-shaped design that captivated the textile industries of Europe. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the paisley had become a fashion craze in Britain and France, a marker of the ‘exotic East’ prized by aristocrats and later bohemian circles in the 1960s and 70s. It remains to date, an abstracted yet perfectly associated symbol of the exotic East, of utopia, of faraway wonder, as the paisley.

19th century, Sheet with overall paisley pattern, decorative paper, Met Museum

The mango’s symbolism shifted with each crossing. What began as a sacred and intimate fruit of the tropics became a fashionable signifier of taste, leisure, and otherness in the world’s imagination. Still, the deeper meanings refused to vanish completely. In diaspora communities, in memory, in South Asian kitchens blooming across cities like London, Toronto, and Melbourne, the mango remained a portal to childhood, to festivals, to the heavy sweetness of a South Asian summer. Recipes travelled too—mango pickles, chutneys, lassis—and with them, stories of migration, resilience, and belonging. Still today, to taste mango is to taste paradise; this has not changed.

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The delight of the mango is not only in the vividness of its taste but also in its exquisite shape, tracing a smiling side of a face or the shape of a drop of liquid. We released the screen-printed poster of a mango to celebrate its visual beauty.

Click to purchase; only a limited number of prints are available.

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The taste of yesterday (Food stories P1): Taste as a time capsule in retracing family threads

“My mother had four siblings. They met once a year for an all-encompassing family potluck lunch at one of the siblings’ houses. Although the lunch itself and the location changed every year, one thing never changed—this was the arrangement for four types of dessert.

My oldest aunt was a woman with a spirit larger than life and a joyous primary colour personality. A sworn ally of us children in all matters against adults, she always brought jelly to the family potluck for dessert. She brought two, sometimes three, brightly coloured jellies cooled in faceted glass bowls. Flipping them was an occasion anticipated by all the cousins who would stand around the table while she carefully unmolded the jellies mirroring the bowl patterns in trembling delight to rounds of applause.

LH Journal, 1984

My mother’s trophy dessert was chocolate biscuit pudding cradling layers of Marie biscuit soaked in full cream milk and melted chocolate; it was a family treasure. One year, she experimented with an orange zest top layer and the entire family protested. “It was so perfect!” “Oh, but the classic CBP is the best.” “I wait for it all year…” “But, why?” My mother was in a strange mix of pride and annoyance that day, but we never endured the orange zest again. The chocolate biscuit pudding remained perfect for as long as we got it.

LH Journal, 1984

My uncle—a gentle botanist and a living encyclopedia of leaves, flowers, fruits, and everything trees—made a delicious peach dessert with fruits grown in his small hill estate. Peach slices in coconut sugar syrup blanched with a dash of cloves was a rare treat that made us children forget our general aversion to fruits. While we ate them, Uncle would tell us about how he took great care to grow peaches in the tropics that were so alien to the species and the difference in taste between the regular peach and the dwarf variety, getting us to guess which one he had used that year.

LH Journal, 1984

My youngest auntie hated cooking of any kind. But, her mother-in-law—a formidable matriarch, fantastic cook and baker who considered it blasphemy to attend a family lunch with no special dish—made a devastatingly good lemon meringue coconut pie for the family potluck. Each year, there would be requests around the table to repeat the recipe, although everyone already knew we would never dare to attempt it. It was the dessert that subdued the noisy household into a helpless afternoon coma in front of the TV, nodding on chairs and collapsing across every divan and sofa until some coffee arrived.

LH Journal, 1984

That was the 1980s. As the cousins dispersed one by one for higher education, jobs, new businesses, marriages and life’s other pulls, the family potluck also slowly came to an end without anyone quite noticing it. But, it remains a core memory holding place for precious conversations, expired jokes, and the close circle we grew up in. The four desserts—the bright jellies glistening merrily, subtly spiced cold peaches bringing upcountry cool to sweltering Colombo, the perfect chocolate biscuit pudding, and the crowning lemon meringue coconut pie—are the cardinals of this evergreen place I hold in my memory. Still, even the most mediocre lemon meringue pie or soulless peach in syrup can trigger longing in me. Still, seeing the giddily shaking surface of coloured jello puts a skip in my heart, momentarily returning me to the edge of the table, waiting for the jellies to be unmolded. Still, when I return home and my mother makes the ‘classic CBP’, we sit together and enjoy a bowlful together, remembering the family in those days—preserved in a technicolour filter, monumentalized at their very best, and still here to visit through taste, smell, and texture.”