How a Dutch visitor fell in love with Laos’ Luang Prabang, stayed and built a botanical garden
Rik Gadella got the idea for the garden 11 years ago after a week’s holiday in Luang Prabang. He rented some land and spent years building up his collection of indigenous plant species
Luang Prabang, the royal capital of Laos before it became a communist nation in 1975, tends to attract the world-weary.
“I was tired of the art world,” says Rik Gadella, founder and chief investor in Pha Tad Ke Botanical Garden, which opened last year 2km (1¼ miles) outside Luang Prabang. It’s a 10- to 20-minute boat rode down the Mekong River, depending on the current.
Gadella, a Dutch national, spent 25 years organising art exhibitions and publishing art books in Paris and New York before he visited Luang Prabang 11 years ago for a one-week holiday and ended up falling in love with the peaceful place.
He decided to extend his stay for another three months, and then some. Gadella chanced upon the Pha Tad Ke site when looking for a small plot of land to build a bungalow where he could catch up on some reading and practise meditation.
Impressed by the location – formerly the hunting pavilion of the viceroy of Luang Prabang – Gadella hatched a plan eight years ago to rent and transform the 15 hectares of surrounding degraded forest into a botanical garden. Not that he knew anything about botany or gardening.
