The Camphor of Kowloon Park Drive

The three camphors already on this page stand behind villages, kept for centuries as feng shui trees. This one stands beside a children's playground, and it is thicker than any of them. Two metres of trunk diameter, sixteen metres tall, a twenty metre crown and normal vigour at its last inspection in October 2022, at the southern end of Kowloon Park near the aviary, which puts it a ten minute walk from the King Banyan at the far end of the same park. Camphor was an industrial commodity long before it was a park tree. The wood and leaves are distilled for camphor itself, and before synthetics took over, that substance was the essential plasticiser for celluloid, which meant photographic film, and a stabiliser for smokeless powder, which meant ammunition. The two together made camphor a strategic material worth controlling, most of the world's supply came out of Taiwan and Japan under state monopoly, and the trees were felled to get it. So a large old camphor is not a neutral object in this part of the world. It is a tree that was worth more cut down than standing and did not get cut. No age is recorded for this one, and a second, smaller camphor stands in the same playground. Crush a fallen leaf and the smell settles the identification instantly.