The Garden in the Jungle (with apologies to Leonard Woolf) – by GEORGE BRAINE   While the world is filled with fear and grief and I am inundated with news of the turmoil in Sri Lanka, my mind turns to a less troubled time when I lived in a garden in the middle of a jungle. In the mid-1960s, my father was posted as the superintendent of the Isolated Seed Garden (ISG), about 15 miles from Chilaw off the Puttalam road. The ISG, owned by the Coconut Research Institute (CRI) and said to be the first of its kind in the world, had been inaugurated in 1955 by Mr. J.R. Jayawardena, who was the Minister of Agriculture at that time. Its purpose was to carry out cross breeding of high quality coconut varieties. For this purpose, the 200-acre seed garden, also known as Ambakelle, had been carved out of virgin ...

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