Sikandar Bagh
On Ashok Marg, between Hazratganj and the river side of town, a fortified garden wall still shows the scars of 16 November 1857. Lucknowis say Sikandar Bagh. Wajid Ali Shah laid the pleasure garden for Sikandar Mahal Begum. Today much of that ground is the botanic garden of CSIR-NBRI, a research institute, not a city picnic park. Morning walkers know the gates. Tourists who arrive at noon expecting a ticketed monument with posted hours often find a quieter, stricter place than the blogs promised.
History
The name means Garden of Sikandar. Standard accounts credit the last Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah, with the villa and walled garden as a summer residence for Sikandar Mahal Begum. NBRI’s own botanic-garden note says the historical Sikander Bagh was laid out around 1800 as a royal garden of the Nawabs, and that the present botanic garden occupies that site, now about 65 acres of planted ground. Wikipedia describes the original enclosure as roughly 150 yards square, about 4.5 acres, with loopholes, a gateway and corner bastions. Both can be true at once: a small fortified bagh inside a later, larger botanic campus.
On 16 November 1857 the garden stood in the way of Sir Colin Campbell’s advance to the Residency. Sepoy fighters had made it a stronghold. After a bombardment, Highlanders and the 4th Punjab Infantry forced a breach and the gateway. The fighting inside ended in the killing of the defenders; British period writing put that number near 2,200. Felice Beato photographed the interior the following year. Cannonballs, musket parts and other metal still turn up in the soil; NBRI has shown some of that material in its displays. The gateway you photograph is the same wall, repaired, with later minarets.
After annexation the garden passed through horticultural and government hands. Kailas Nath Kaul’s National Botanic Gardens work, taken over by CSIR in 1953, became the National Botanical Research Institute in 1978. Sikandar Bagh is the historic name of the ground. NBRI is the institute that now occupies it. The storming of this garden and the later fight at Shah Najaf Imambara belong to the same November day.
What to see
Start with the gateway. It is the 1857 face of the place, the one in the old photographs. Scars in the masonry are easier to see when you look for them. Inside the wider campus, NBRI keeps thematic plant houses, an arboretum, labelled trees, and, on its own account, collections of bougainvillea, gladiolus, chrysanthemum, canna, rose, lotus and water lily. A Touch and Smell garden with Braille is listed for visitors who need it. A large banyan is the morning-walkers’ landmark. Flower shows, held on announced days, are when the institute most clearly opens the beds to a general crowd.
This is not Lucknow Zoo and it is not Janeshwar Mishra Park. Do not pack a picnic assuming lawn rights. Do not wander into experimental plots or glasshouses if a keeper waves you back. The Uda Devi statue on campus remembers a Pasi woman said to have fought from a tree during the 1857 defence; the story is local memory, kept in stone.
Visiting
CSIR’s botanic-garden page, updated 21 July 2026, says more than a thousand morning walkers use the garden each day. It does not print a tourist tariff or a 9-to-5 clock. Third-party listings disagree wildly: some say 5 am to 8:30 am only, others invent a full public day. Office hours for the institute are not the same as garden access. Flower-show weekends are the usual time a casual visitor is welcomed through the beds. Confirm at the NBRI gate on Rana Pratap Marg / Ashok Marg. Do not treat a hotel blog’s “no entry fee, open all day” line as a rule.
Hazratganj Metro is the nearest useful station, then an auto. La Martiniere College and Dilkusha Kothi continue the 1857 geography eastward; those are a school and an ASI ruin, not extra lawns of this garden. Winter mornings are the kindest hour if walkers’ access is what you get.
Nearby
Shah Najaf Imambara is the next 1857 stop on this side of town. Hazratganj is close for tea after the wall. Banarasi Bagh holds the zoo and the State Museum. The Residency is the siege you were walking toward if you came for 1857. More Lucknow ground is listed under places.
Come for the gateway and a sober hour. If the plant houses are closed, the wall still did what it did in November 1857.