Quel est l'arbre le plus vieux de Singapore ?

Singapore's Heritage Tree Scheme, launched in 2001, is unusually precise as these registers go: every one of its 251 trees carries a measured girth, height and, where evidence allows, an age estimate, reviewed periodically by NParks arborists. Most entries carry no confirmed planting date at all, since they were already mature specimens when the scheme began surveying the island's remaining old growth. The Tembusu is the exception. NParks dates it to more than 200 years before the Botanic Gardens itself opened in 1859, based on its size and growth pattern relative to other tembusu of documented age, making it older than the Gardens that now contain it. Its fame outside botanical circles comes from a single distinctive branch, a low lateral limb curling out almost parallel to the ground, which illustrator Eng Siak Loy chose to draw on the reverse of Singapore's five-dollar note. Several of Fort Canning Park's own heritage trees are older by inference, planted during an early-1900s ornamental scheme whose planting records were never kept, but without a documented date none can currently outrank the Tembusu's sourced estimate.