Brief Garden. Bevies Bawa. Beruwela. Srilanka.

Major Bevis William Frederick Bawa, ADC, CLI (26 April 1909 – 18 September 1992) was a Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) planter, soldier and a landscaper. He was also one of the most renowned landscape architects in Sri Lanka and served as the Aide-de-camp to four Governors of Ceylon.

Bevis Bawa was born on 26 April 1909 in Colombo, the eldest son of Captain Benjamin William Bawa (1865–1923), a wealthy and successful lawyer, of Muslim and European parentage, and Bertha Marianne née Schrader (1876–1946), who was of mixed German, Scottish and Sinhalese descent. He had one younger brother, Geoffrey Bawa (1919–2003) ten years his junior, who is regarded as being one of the most important and influential Asian architects of the twentieth century.

Bawa was educated at Royal College Colombo but had to leave school at seventeen when his father died while in England. His mother sent him to be trained as a planter at his uncle’s estates in order to take up the management of the family estate in Aluthgama known as Brief Estate.

The Brief Garden is a labour of love. Bawa, a landscape architect inherited the land on which the garden is now located as a rubber plantation, and began cultivating it in the late 1920s.

The garden is said to have been designed in the late 1929s, and was open to the public in 1969 by which time it was already famous.