Singapore Botanic Gardens

The Singapore Botanic Gardens are the green heart of the city and, since 2015, its first UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed as an outstanding example of a British colonial tropical botanic garden that evolved into a world-class scientific institution. Founded in 1859, the gardens shaped Southeast Asia's economy: it was here that the rubber tree was developed as a plantation crop, starting an industry that transformed Malaya. Today they cover more than eighty hectares between the Tanglin and Bukit Timah roads, open from 5am to midnight every day, and they are free. The best part costs a little: the National Orchid Garden, the largest display of tropical orchids anywhere, with more than a thousand species and two thousand hybrids, a cool house that recreates a highland cloud forest, and the VIP Orchid Garden, where hybrids named after visiting heads of state and celebrities are displayed. Admission is a modest fee for adult visitors, and children under twelve go free. Elsewhere in the gardens are a patch of original rainforest older than the gardens themselves, Swan Lake and Symphony Lake with its lakeside stage, a ginger garden, a healing garden and the Jacob Ballas Children's Garden, with water play and treehouses for children up to fourteen (closed on Mondays). The gardens are where locals jog, do tai chi and picnic, and an early-morning visit, before the heat, is one of the most pleasant things to do in Singapore.

The history is what earned the UNESCO listing. The gardens were laid out in the English landscape style in the mid-nineteenth century and soon became a centre for economic botany. Under its director Henry Ridley at the end of the nineteenth century, the gardens perfected a way of tapping rubber trees without killing them and promoted the crop to planters across the region; within decades rubber was Malaya's great export. Orchid breeding began in the 1920s and turned Singapore into a centre of the orchid trade; the national flower, the Vanda Miss Joaquim, is a hybrid. The heritage trees, colonial-era buildings and the rainforest fragment are all part of the listed landscape.

How to visit: go early. The gardens open at 5am and the light and temperature are best before 9am, when the National Orchid Garden opens at 8:30am. Enter at the Tanglin Gate (Napier MRT station on the Thomson-East Coast Line) for the classic route past Swan Lake and the bandstand to the Orchid Garden, then exit at the Bukit Timah Gate by Botanic Gardens MRT station on the Circle and Downtown lines. The Orchid Garden's last ticket sale is at 6pm. Allow two to three hours for a relaxed loop; the gardens are hilly in places, so wear comfortable shoes and carry water. There are cafes and restaurants inside, including breakfast spots near the Tanglin Gate.

The gardens sit at the end of Orchard Road and close to Dempsey Hill, a former army barracks now filled with restaurants and bars, which makes a good lunch stop. Combine a morning here with afternoon shopping on Orchard Road, or with an afternoon at the Gardens by the Bay domes for a full day of Singapore's two very different gardens: one Victorian and scientific, one futuristic and theatrical.