The Timeless Bloom:

How Sri Lanka’s Horton Plains awaken every 12 Years

- By DILuM ALAGIYAWANNA.

The Valley in Bloom lhe air is crisp and thin atop Horton Plains, the morning mist curling like breath over the rolling patanas.

This is 2025, and Sri Lanka's highlands are once again transformed by the mass flowering of Strobilanthes, locally called “Nilu.” It is an event so rare and rhythmic that few living people have witnessed it more than twice in their lifetime. For those who stand here today—among the rippling blossoms, where clouds cast fleeting shadows across mauve hillsides—it feels as though time itself blooms with the flowers.

I first stood amid this botanical tide in 2013, camera in hand, the Horton Plains veiled in violet light. Even then, I sensed that I was witnessing something larger than beauty—a heartbeat of the land, one that pulses only every 12 years. Digging deeper, I discovered that I was not alone in this fascination. In 1910, British planter and naturalist Thomas Farr, who built the original “Farr Bungalow” at Horton Plains, wrote of this same miracle in meticulous detail.

Farr documented the great flowerings of 1881, 1893, and 1905, and confidently predicted the next in 1917. His forecast proved astonishingly accurate. Since then, the blooms have recurred with unwavering regularity: 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013, and now—true to the century-long rhythm—2025.

During my own field visits, I uncovered fragments of local memory and tangible evidence: Mr. Perera of Ohiya spoke of the 2001 bloom with reverence, recalling how the hills turned purple overnight. My 2013 documentation added another link in the chain—a living continuation of Farr’s cycle, now spanning more than 140 years.

This year’s spectacle not only confirms Farr’s observations; it validates nature’s astonishing precision. Across the plateau, the Nilu has kept time better than any clock we could build.

The Nilu belongs to the genus