Lunaganga

Lunaganga

Lunaganga is in Bentota, Sri Lanka. It was made by Geoffrey Bawa between 1948-1998. it was a residential and landscape project and was used as a private residence and garden.
The journey to Lunuganga begins on the doorstep of the house in 33rd Lane, whence the car sets out on the harrowing journey along the coast road to Galle. After 60 kilometres the road crosses the Bentota River over the old Dorman Long Bridge, providing glimpses of the Bentota Beach Hotel, Bawa's lost masterpiece, and the sea beyond. On the left a narrow, bumpy road snakes through a dense hinterland of small villages to a causeway that crosses the neck between the Bentota River and the Dedduwa Lake, offering the first distant view of Lunuganga's northern terraces. But, like William Kent's scenario for the great eighteenth century English garden at Stowe, the road now leads off in a circle so that the final approach to the house is from the other side. At last a laterite track leads through a paddy field and towards a thickly wooded hill where an overgrown portal announces the boundary of Lunuganga and a steep driveway swings up through the trees to arrive at the foot of a cascade of steps that climb to the bungalow's southern terrace. The view from the entrance terrace towards Cinnamon Hill and a distant temple comes as a complete surprise. It is as if, having been spun around in a game of blindman's buff, the blindfold has suddenly been removed to reveal the centre of a magic kingdom.
The bungalow lies at the hub of the composition and it is the only point from which all of the garden's separate elements can be comprehended. The estate sits astride two low hills on a promontory jutting into the Dedduwa Lake, a brackish lagoon fed by an estuary of the Bentota River. A mile away to the west, the waves of the Indian Ocean roll in over coral reefs to break onto a white beach fringed with coconut palms. To the east, beyond serried ranks of rubber-tree-covered hills and rice-carpeted valleys, lies the mysterious Sinharaja Forest, Sri Lanka's last surviving area of primeval rainforest. The area around Lunuganga is the wettest and most fertile region of the island, a vast hothouse of exotic trees and plants. But, like so much of Sri Lanka's landscape, Lunuganga is a man-made creation, which in its previous incarnations has been a Dutch cinnamon garden and a British rubber estate.
In 1948 there was nothing more here than an undistinguished bungalow surrounded by 25 acres of rubber trees, enjoying only limited views northwards across the Dedduwa Lake. Since then hills have been moved, terraces cut, woods replanted, new vistas opened up and the old estate road has been buried within a ha-ha. The house itself has been turned inside out, but the original shell survives within a cocoon of new verandahs, courtyards and loggias.