Sri Lanka is home to a surprisingly diverse array of environments: from dense tropical rainforests to coral reefs, from tidelands to savannahs, from mangrove forests to sand dunes. Haeckel set to work familiarizing himself with almost everything they contained. He was especially impressed by the palms, those “princes among plants”. In the hills whose lower stretches were covered with meadows and rice fields, he discovered thick brushland where the trees “have grown up without any kind of order, and in such wild confusion — so tangled with creepers and climbers, with parasitic ferns, orchids and other hangers-on, every gap closed with a compact network of bush and brake — that it is quite impossible to unravel the knot and distinguish the closely matted stems.” According to Haeckel, simply taking a few steps into this tangled growth was a dangerous undertaking. He recalled being attacked by mosquitos, bitten by ants, and plagued by all the nettles and thorns deployed by the plants to “bar the way into their mysterious labyrinth”. It was here that Haeckel first glimpsed the magnificent Gloriosa superba, “the poisonous climbing lily of Ceylon, with its golden-red crown”. Large black apes and swarms of green parrots surrounded him, and he killed “an enormous lizard above six feet long (the singular Hydrosaurus salvator)” — a creature resembling a crocodile — with a shot to the head. He also encountered the talipot tree or “century palm”, with its tall trunk like a slender marble column. The talipot blooms just once, usually between the ages of fifty and eighty, when a pyramidal bush composed of millions of yellowish-white flowers emerges from its crown.