What do we know about the home gardens of urban Ceylon, and how are these spaces remembered through literature and history? Drawing from the burgeoning field of plant humanities, this talk reads the literary gardens in Sri Lankan writing alongside those recorded by colonial travel writers to rethink the garden as a more-than-human space where memories, bodies, and biopolitics shape how it is imagined, perceived, and experienced. By situating the gardens within the larger organism of the city, the talk also invites us to experience them as spaces transformed by our changing relationships with both past and future urban life.

Pawan Wijesinghe is an educator and researcher whose work spans literature, cultural studies, and the environmental humanities. His research interrogates the representation of the body, animality, and ecology across diverse literary and visual cultures, with particular emphasis on interdisciplinary and premodern literary traditions.