The flowering trees have always draw exclamations purely on account of their vibrant colours. The African tulip tree with its brilliant red flowers, the grow tall along a number of the roads across Bali. The cassia and the coral tree, delightful as these are, are simply outdone by the flame-of-the forest and jacaranda when these are completely suffused with their blooms. Trumped-shaped datura and oleanders, odeniums (jepun jepang) and golden allamanda, hail from bushes. The familiar hibiscus and the exotic gardenia, tight-balled amaranths and wispy Mexican lilacs - so many are the flowering beauties in Bali. These and the myriad varieties of green foliage plants and ferns thrive in the warm, humid hothouse lands throughout monsoon Asia, and in a Balinese garden these are woven these exotic tapestries.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

Bali has volcanic history. It is thus blessed with the fertility of rich, volcanic soil. It has an abundance of rain and its hundreds of natural springs and rivers provide sustaining life for growth. The warm, humanity that envelopes these latitudes, encourages almost every colour that fills the eye of the beholder is green-gree4n in all its variant range from mellow golden green to the dark depths of blue-green verdure. The whole island is a riot of creepers and shrubs, tumbling in paradisiacal profusion that has drawn extravagant epithets of its likeness to the Garden of Eden. Visitors, particularly those with romantic inclinations, experience the island as a great garde4n comprised of inter-connected lesser gardens, both natural and human-made.

According to William Warren in his book Balinese Garden, the evolution of garden design in Bali has followed that of the tourism industry. That is, over the past two decades, western concepts of the tropical garden as lush jungle-in-miniatures has been suffused with pre-existing principles of landscape design. "A few decades ago, most gardens on the island tended more towards the sepi side, with perhaps the odd croton or coleus added for colour. In more recent years the ramai end of the spectrum has come into favour, featuring a profusion of brightly-coloured plants, "argues Warren.

In the last decades, garden designers from Europe and Australia have brought to Balinese garden design extravagant lushness that has come to be Magnificent red gingers, their crimson stalks exotic against the simplicity of their leaves, heliconias and cannas from dramatic backdrops to masses of variegated althernanthera and clumps of crinum lilies. The Pagoda shrub with its many-tiered peach-pink flowers rises head and shoulders above a sea of philodendrons flamboyant trees spread their branches over pavilions lapped by moats and lakes. The designers dazzled the eye with a sense of abundance by showing a variety en-masse, thus even the humblest plant such repeated luxuriance. The eye moves from abundance to the solitary beauty of a single lontar palm. The against beyond it to be faced by the dense growth of gingers and heliconias. It moves once more through a dark pond, its banks kissed by drooping local willows and brushed by water reeds, to alight on a small clump of periwinkles, their dazzling pinks startling the eye. And once more into luxuriance. Everywhere this alternating ramai and sepi holds the beholder in s contemplation of nature.

Huge jars, some of them delightfully moss-covered, others stark and simple, sit amongst seas of green. Statues, absorbed in their own thoughts, surprise, inhuman but enchanting, sit upon stone and wood stump pedestals. Thatched roofs roofs shrine-like lanterns peep through trees and shrubs. Or a fierce, gruesome but benevolent 'guardian' statue, draped in a black-and-white-chequered sarong, a blood-red hibiscus tucked behind hie ear, could suddenly be seen near the household shrines of the hotel resort.

SYMBIOSIS

Whether traditional and modern, all gardens in Bali seen to evoke a sense of the spiritual. The abundance of plant life, tenderly cultivated ands meticulously cared for, breathes a power over the beholder that is both up-lifting and at the same time humbling. The ego seem absent - the designer goes unacknowledged, and the selection is so predictable. The island leaves nature-lovers yearning to reproduce some of the soul of the Balinese garden is to be enriched by this realization of humanity's symbiosis with nature, and to be humbled by it.

top:Scenes from the magnisficent garden of the Bali Hyatt In Sanur

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